DXPR Drupal Blog

Being a webdeveloper is not enough if you also want the freedom and flexibility of self-employment. You have to learn marketing skills, time management skills and come up with ways to set yourself apart from the crowd.

I feel compelled to spend this summer working on my business rather than in my business and I'm going to try and (finally) learn the following 10 skills that I'm sure will help my my webdev business:

In the recently completed Poll on the purpose of the Politika theme we have established that it will be an ecommerce theme!

This is exciting as well as challenging. E-commerce site really need a design that is focused on the content and focused on selling. Good Ubercart themes should also have some nice icons to skin the stock imagery.

I do not often build ecommerce sites but I do have experience in this and I also have a Msc in marketing (pending my thesis) so this project will be a nice combination of my web and uni educations.

Now it's time to discuss the style of this design. I want to build a theme that you all are dying to use on your next project so I would like to hear what kind of design styles are in demand in the community.

I just released SooperFish Multi-Column dropdown menus version 0.2. Changelog:

SooperFish 0.2, 15-06-2010
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- Added classnames to indicate when menus are multicolumn
- Checked compatibility with jQuery 1.4, worked fine for me

Nothing special. I got a complaint about the menu not loading with jQuery 1.4.2. I tried it and it worked fine with 1.4.2, and also with 1.3.x. If anyone still has problems with this, let me know, and if possible also check for any errors in the firebug console!

Politika is an effort to make an amazing looking and rich-featured theme for Drupal 7 and 6. It will be designed for the community, and in part by the community… though it will not be designed by democracy; to maintain a coherent and high quality design that adheres to web and accessibility standards we will have to be a republic. But the good type of republic, that listens to the people!

SooperFish is a highly configurable solution for animated dropdown menus. It combines the features of superfish, structured programming of Droppy and a ton of new features like multi-column dropdown menus and configurable show AND hide animation with custom easing.

It was originally created to power the drop-down menus for the premium drupal themes on this site and now it's avaiable to anyone.

Demo:

Also check the Synopsis premium drupal theme for an excellent demonstration of SooperFish combined with Cufon!

Download:

edit 29-12-2011: Due to the jQuery repository having problems I've put SooperFish on github:

After some struggling to properly get this complex multisite properly moved and rebranded the transformation has finally completed. If you have any links pointing to the old domain name, I would be thankful if you could update them to sooperthemes.com. All old url's are cloned to the new site.

Update: This plugin has materialized, check out the SooperFish jQuery multi-column drop-down plugin

From previous blog posts I've learned that multi column / animated dopdown menus are really in demand. I've now pretty much completed a new jQuery plugin that handles all this. At first I started modifying superfish but I had learned that superfish uses some really funky events bindings and event handling which caused the submenu-hide animations to fail on sub-sub menus, and there were some other weird bugs.

So I spent the whole day coding a new plugin based on the much leaner jQuery droppy plugin and had a much better time working up from there! So now I thought why stop now, maybe someone can think of some cool features that I haven't yet implemented.