Posted by opegasus on April 9, 2012 at 2:52pm
Howdy all!
Anyone play with the latest Omega (3.X) multi theme? Looks pretty cool and can help developers/themers reach a large scalable (device-monitor) audience.
http://drupal.org/project/omega
http://developmentgeeks.com/blog/omega-3x-responsive-grid
Comments
UM School of Journalism
We recently finished http://jour.umt.edu using Omega as a base theme. Resize your browser to see the responsive goodness.
Scott Rouse
http://about.me/scott.rouse
Nice...
How do you like it as a back end developer/themer?
Not bad
I've gotten used to working with Zen, and it's still my base theme of choice, but Omega does have some nice built-in responsive features. The UI to create and move regions is a bit heavy handed for me, and I found it difficult to do it via code, which is how I prefer to get my tpl files set up.
Scott Rouse
http://about.me/scott.rouse
Thanks...
Have a client that tripped over it and now wants to use it. As one who hasn't worked with Omega, it looks good from the outside looking in but, thought I'd post/ask before opening a Pandora's box.
Thanks Scott, have an awesome!
Go ahead
Good job doing your due diligence. It's a fairly well-supported theme under active development. I don't have any reason to advise you against using it.
Scott Rouse
http://about.me/scott.rouse
Omega vs other responsive Drupal themes
[Disclaimer: I have not yet built a Drupal site using one of these reponsive base themes yet, info below based on second-hand scuttlebut].
Omega has gotten a lot of attention, partly because it has a good marketing/hype push behind it. What I have heard echoes what Scott said, namely that it has a heavyweight settings/config UI that caters to people who don't necessarily know Drupal theming the traditional way (e.g. .tpl.php files and knowing how to work with template.php) And it apparently is a solid responsive/adaptive base theme. It has the endorsement of some big organizations and apparently has been or is being adopted as the base theme for some major Drupal distributions (e.g. OpenPublish)
I recently attended an Acquia webinar on using Omega, which was interesting and informative, but did not compare Omega to other responsive theme solutions for Drupal. Check out the webinar here:
http://www.acquia.com/resources/acquia-tv/conference/responsive-web-desi...
There are alternatives to Omega for Drupal responsive base themes. I have heard good things about AdaptiveTheme (http://drupal.org/project/adaptivetheme) for example.
Personally I would spend a few days trying out 3 or 4 alternative responsive/adaptive base themes before committing to one for a commercial project – they'll all have differences in approach, CSS framework, maintainability, subtheme support, etc. Better to know the field and pick the right theme for the job.
P.S. I also HIGHLY recommend this article:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/
and this book:
http://www.abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design/
to grok the basics of responsive design before delving into it in a Drupal context.