Glazed Theme Update and Roadmap

We are working hard at Sooperthemes to grow your favorite product: Glazed theme. Here's a little update on what's going on and what you can expect in the near future. I'm expanding the team with extra help in development and with building new subthemes. This way we can work on multiple fronts at the same time. Before it was just me working on development, design and marketing. This is not a scalable solution, so we are expanding.

The Drag and Drop Page builder

The PageBuilder is getting a big update. I'm are working hard to review the pagebuilder and looking critically at its strong and weak points. I would say that even though it's aimed at sitebuilders it can still be a bit intimidating to even experienced sitebuilders with all its options and settings. I'm first going to do a cleanup round and shave off features that no one is using. Next, I will improve the UX design of the builder and add powerful features.

My favorite update is the improved views integration in the pagebuilder. The pagebuilder already provides all Drupal blocks and views displays. The next step is a smart integration of views contextual filters. You will be able to clone views displays within a layout and put in contextual filters. This will empower you to build magazine layouts, by cloning blocks and filtering a category per block. You will be able to build e-commerce sites, and build a homepage with multiple category listing in any responsive bootstrap layout you can imagine. Without writing any code, or creating new views displays. 

This will open up the possibility to build the most dynamic and maintainable responsive Drupal sites you have every seen. I expect to release this updates in about 2 weeks. Following on that we will start putting out subthemes with demo content so you can see this in action.

Decoupled Theme, Page builder, and Distribution

Until now the Glazed theme is tied to it's installation profile and the drag and drop builder. This is ok if you want to start building a new website but this is not ideal for users who want to use our pagebuilder or Glazed theme on existing sites. Therefore we will start treating the pagebuilder as a product on its own. We will release it separately and it will have its own brand and documentation on our website.  We will also make the Glazed theme less dependent on modules and trim the number of modules in our distribution.

Glazed 2.4

The next version of Glazed will be 2.4. Besides the revised pagebuilder it will include updates to header design, exciting new sidebar elements, and a cleaned up and improved set of Bootstrap 3 layout tools. 

Documentation

Of course, I can't finish this blog post without saying something about documentation. Current documentation is limited and I'm working on a plan for more extensive documentation. However, since we are refactoring code and rebranding the pagebuilder, documentation has to wait. It's no good if all screenshots and video images are immediately outdated because we wrote documentation before updating the codebase. I'm talking to a certain Drupal training company that you might have heard of, for production of a full video series.