Using the Extreme Updates theme for Drupal
If you've visited CMS Report lately, you likely noticed that we're sporting a new look and feel. Over the years, I've used various Drupal themes and many of those themes were made available for free at Drupal.org. For the past couple years, I used RoopleTheme's LiteJazz. LiteJazz spoiled me. The theme was so well designed that I don't recall having to do the usual hacks to the templates or CSS styles to make it a good fit for CMSReport.com. Thanks RoopleTheme!
Today, I'm using the Extreme Updates. The free theme is designed by Template World and ported to Drupal by 3rdWorld. In my opinion, the Extreme Updates theme has a few flaws in its design that I'm needing to fix. You'll have to be patient with me because I'm not much of a designer. Luckily, the theme utilizes the impressive Genesis package, a start theme for Drupal 6. This is the very first time I've used a Genesis theme but I'm just as impressed with Genesis as I was when I first used Zen, another starter theme for Drupal.
This time around when considering a new theme, I also did something I've never done before. I considered spending money for a theme. In the past, CMSReport.com has never generated the revenue I needed to justify hiring a Drupal service company to design a theme for my site. However, something interesting has happened in the Drupal community, a number of design companies have started to design and sell themes geared toward the smaller Drupal sites like mine.
The availability of quality themes by such companies as community favorite TopNotchThemes shows just how much the Drupal ecosystem has matured over the years. Doesn't it seem just like yesterday when the biggest complaint about Drupal was that there were no good themes available? The future for Drupal theme development looks very bright. My understanding is that there are a number of changes in Drupal 7 that will make the web designers very happy. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised to see in 2010 the quantity of available Drupal themes reach toward the same numbers that we've seen for Wordpress and Joomla!.
Changing to a new theme also marks the beginning of my desire to move CMSReport.com into some new directions. I want this site to have a more professional and community feel to it. I'm personally tired of reading mostly my own posts here and I think it's time to get a lot more author's involved. These changes will be progressive over the coming months, but won't be settled until the arrival of Drupal 7. As has been since Drupal 4.6, I've always geared the features in my sites to allow for a quick upgrade to the latest version of Drupal. Similar to the past, you just might see this site running a beta or release candiate of Drupal 7 by the end of the year.
About this CMS Enthusiast
Bryan Ruby is the owner and editor for CMS Report. He founded CMSReport.com in 2006 on the belief that information technologists, website owners, and web developers desired visiting sites where they could learn about content management systems without the sales pitch. Outside of his late night blogging hours, he is the Information Technology Officer for a field office in the federal government.
Comments
#1 What fixes are you making?
I too have been looking at the Extreme Updates theme. I've run into a couple issues myself like the theme breaking if you disable the search box.
Unfortunately the creator does not provide any support and the theme isn't (won't?) be uploaded to drupal for community fixes. So I too am having to try and fix issues myself, which isn't necessarily bad because it helps me learn.
So what sort of fixes are you having to make?
#2 Extreme Updates Fixes
I haven't come across the search box issue, I'll have to check that out. Some of my initial thoughts on the "flaws" that I see need fixing are not so much bug fixes as they are personal annoyances.
Some of the fixes/need to fixes include:
#3 Extreme Updates theme: node changes
I decided I didn't like the layout in the node section and I did a rewrite of the node.tpl.php. I also removed the "info box" in the theme and I'm now using a bock generated by the core profile module for my "About the Author". The new changes also do more than the original node template in the Extreme Updates theme depending on whether the content is displayed in a full node or as a teaser.
This is the first time I've ever used the profile module in Drupal. It's not that I didn't know what the profile module could do, it's just until now I ever had the desire to want more in the user profiles. There is so much to Drupal...
#4 Nice so far.
You should shorten the date to just the day, month and year. It'd look much better. Other than that, there's the avatar. You could use some simple css to add margin and a border. Don't use padding or the border will be spaced away from the image. Margin is like padding but on the outside of the border. Hope that makes sense.
Anyway, nice work so far. I'm a Drupal user, too, so I understand how difficult it could be.
#5 Even with likes of topnotch i
Even with likes of topnotch i think drupal is still laging way behind in terms of design when compared with wordpress or joomla, but as you said it's slowly starting to change hopefully at a much quicker phase