Click the heading to see the rest of the Sooperthemes.com redesign, or go browse our new Drupal themes

Who now?

Today the new sooperthemes.com is officially going live. I have been talking about my awesome new themes for more than a year now but it's finally time to share. I hope that the direction I've taken with my themes will change the perspective people have of Drupal, as being the ugly ducking, and turn it into a awesomely extendable, flexible, configurable and re-colorable beautiful Swan!.

There is also a Design to Drupal service which is a service for superquick drupal theming gigs. This something I've been doing for years and I'm making this service faster and cheaper using the sooperthemes.com basetheme and Drupal/Storm based project management.

p.s. due the theming on sooperthemes.com is not 100% done, which is why the blog looks a little boring

Some coolness in the themes that I would like to highlight:

1. Full color module integration. Including jQuery scripts that re-color the whole layout while you are dragging the Farbtastic Color Picker marker. (video coming soon).
2. Filebased theme-settings CSS caching. I'll write a blog post about this later.
3. Regions that can squeeze an unlimited amount of blocks in a space and divide the space equally, it's really simple but effective: if ($precount > 1) { $prewidth = round(100/$precount,3)-1; } where precount is the number of blocks in the "pre-blocks" region.
4. Fully standards compliant code with accessibility features (skip to content etc.)
5. Animated Dropd-down mennus with HoverIntent
6. Both commercial and free support

Some background info:

I've worked on these themes for over a year and I've been working on them fulltime for the past 3 months (or rather "all the time"), because it really is hard to make themes that are distributed to such a wide range of users. The most work by far was making the themes re-colorable, before I got that right, I really had to study the workings of color spaces, namely HSL Color Space, and then I had to implement that on my designs. I had tried to teach my designers how to make designs in such a way that it's easy to integrate them with color module but you can't just change how a professional designer does his job. It's also very hard for non-technical designers to comprehend all the technicalities that are involved when taking the color "out of a design" so that you can put different colors in, programmatically.

Now that I have this experience it's easier, but the color module really needs to get out of core so that we can improve it. I've started a discussion about this topic but I'm not really sure how this should be arranged, if anyone here with drupal-core involvement would like to help out please don't hesitate to step into the conversation or email me.

Of course, I would love to hear feedback from the community, since these themes are really for you guys, so please drop a comment if you like or dislike something.

Future Plans

There are going to be more theme releases in the future! A new release each month would be great but that's not realistic for now. Currently it looks like the production cycle for a theme is about 6 weeks. These themes are really software packages all by themself, on average a theme has over 120 files.

I have to admit that with this first batch of themes, I've focused way more time on the technology than I have on the designs, but now that I have a re-usable framework for all the technology that I need, I expect the designs will get better and better, hopefully the best in the business

Giving back to the community

I've given this a lot of thought, and I had initially planned to donate X dollars to the Drupal Associattion for each theme sold. However, this seems pretty uncommon in the community so I've decided it's probably better, easier, and more transparent to pay in kind rather than in cash. All the technology under the hood of my themes will be shared, documented and tutorialized so that people can learn from the code. I'm currently working on a final version of my basetheme that I will distribute under GPL and commit to the Drupal contrib repository.