Blueprint Drupal Theme Released

Well, it took longer than I expected (announced it a couple months back), but I’m pleased to announce that my Blueprint Drupal Theme has been released!

This theme uses the most excellent Blueprint CSS frameworkto setup a starter Drupal theme to make theming websites faster and easier, especially in the cross browser area. The benefits of this framework include:

• An easily customizable grid
• Sensible typography
• Relative font-sizes everywhere
• A typographic baseline
• An extendable plugin system
• Perfected CSS reset
• A stylesheet for printing
• Powerful scripts for customizing your layout
• No bloat of any kind

Compared to the YUI grid CSS, I find Blueprint simpler and more elegant. I have used both frameworks on various projects and the Blueprint has consistently been easier and faster to work with.

The goal of this theme is to take many of theming tricks I reuse on site after site and bundle these up, along with properly integrating the Blueprint CSS framework (since Drupal’s CSS, is well, not the nicest thing out there ;-)) so no weird/odd CSS defects occur. The result is an amazing (well at least IMHO) starter theme. I used a beta version of this theme to design my entire blog in 90 minutues, including image generation & export, cross browser CSS testing, and the like. Not too shabby huh? You can also see origins of this theme at MothersClick, MomBlogNetwork, and 2 Guys Uncorked.

Features in this theme include:

• normalizes Drupal’s CSS to be consistent
• properly aggregates all blueprint CSS files into a single file when this setting is enabled
• put scripts at bottom of page for nice performance gains, read more
• flexible layout, from 1 to 3 columns, based on where you configure your blocks to show (left, center, right)
• SEO optimization without the need for heavy modules and additional queries per page
• automatically adds META description to many pages, read more
• automatically adds META keywords if taxonomy exists on that node, read more
• better forum icons
• [improve forum display and performance(http://www.sysarchitects.com/node/70)
• prevents duplicate form submissions with jQuery, read more
• shows the # of comments below a node since Drupal doesn’t do this by default (usability)
• highlight any comments by the author of the node
• adds a “you need to login / register” box below all comments if you can’t add a comment (usability)
• supports conditional comment subjects, if the setting is off it won’t show a chopped off title of the comment
• uses CSSEdit http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/ comments for grouping of styles
• lots of comments and theming tricks in template.php to learn from :) A special thanks to Richard Burford (aka psynaptic) who submitted patches and README info and helped debug things :)