Sooperthemes 2015-2018 Retrospective: Crafting Enterprise-Ready Solutions For A Better Drupal Experience
As of today Sooperthemes provides the only proven enterprise-grade drag and drop Drupal builder, and framework theme. Examples proving this point are sites being rolled out by the United Nations, Google, and by the US Senate for all newly inaugurated senators!
3 years ago, Sooperthemes started developing Drupal tools in a novel way: developing every tool as a platform. This resulted in our theme agnostic Glazed Builder drag and drop solution, and our Glazed framework theming platform. Throughout the years, Sooperthemes has evolved to become much more than just a theme shop. While we still provide a gallery of premium Drupal designs that can be found on our website, we now focus our efforts towards developing solutions rather than tools that bring great value to all Drupal users, organizations, governments, and enthusiasts worldwide.
At Sooperthemes we believe that building web content should be an easy and approachable process for anyone, even for people who aren't necessarily tech savvy. With this idea in mind we are headed on a mission: To empower Drupal users with the necessary capabilities to build high-end responsive websites as well as help experienced site builders and organizations work faster through development automation.
Sooperthemes today
Our Glazed framework theme allows users to have control over every aspect of a Drupal site: from typography to colors, grid design and navigation. Combine this with our Drag and Drop builder and everything you need on a professional website can be designed and developed directly in the browser. This empowers your marketing and design staff to work efficiently without incurring heavy IT costs.
When you take look at Drupal competitors such as WordPress and cloud based solutions like Squarespace, one of the main reasons they successfully skyrocketed in the web development industry is because of the simple front-end editing experience and the value this experience brings to the users. Glazed Builder brings this modern site-building experience to the Drupal world by combining the power and unique aspects of Drupal with the simplicity and intuitiveness of Drag and Drop technology.
Glazed Builder is different from Wix, Squarespace, or any other Drag and Drop builders: it's made for Drupal and deeply integrated with Drupal APIs. It acts as a Drupal field formatter and you can have multiple instances per page, for your footer, main content, blocks, and even custom entity types. It automatically understands Drupal's revision system, language systems, workflow states, and permissions. This makes it one of the most advanced visual page builders in the world from a website architecture perspective.
How Sooperthemes products create a better Drupal experience
Drag and Drop tools have evolved to be more powerful, produce better code, and leverage frontend frameworks to create a fluent authoring experience that runs in the browser. In Glazed Builder this experience is integrated with Views and the block systems: you can create highly dynamic pages and even dashboards with Drag and Drop, without losing reusability of the components you build. It is available for both Drupal 8 and Drupal 7, and provides the tools to easily perform difficult customization tasks. It lets the user focus on creating value for the customers and leave the technical aspects behind. It's intuitive and easy to use out of the box.
Adding Glazed Builder on top of your existing Drupal 8 stack
Glazed Builder is theme agnostic, meaning it can plug directly into your existing site infrastructure and is compatible with any theme. You don’t necessarily have to use our Glazed Theme, you can add the Glazed Builder module directly on your website and get the same benefits you get from installing it on a Sooperthemes theme. Moreover, Sooperthemes products are built by developers who have 12+ years of experience working with Drupal and you don't have to worry about shortcodes or vendor lock-in when you use the product.
Role based user profiles to customize the Glazed Builder interface
As a site administrator you can limit what users with specific Drupal roles see in their Glazed interface using the Glazed Builder profiles editor. You have total control over who has access to specific Glazed Builder elements, Drupal blocks, Views display and text editor buttons. This allows for a smooth workflow for your web team, giving them access to the tools that are relevant specifically to their tasks. While removing all elements and features that can distract them.
Front end development
When you add or change content on a page, you can see and experience what your visitor is going to see when browsing your website. Working from the front end allows you to focus on building amazing experiences and engage your audience on a deeper level by producing and designing valuable content for your audience. The freedom to leverage and shape your perfect web page is at your fingertips, the limit is your creativity and the way you use the tools.
Save time & reduce IT costs
Using Glazed products will save you precious time on a daily basis. Tasks that previously needed a developer's assistance and would take hours can now be performed directly in the front-end within minutes. Moreover, editing or adding new content to your website is just a couple of clicks away. IT costs savings come from automating technical challenges in designing websites and crafting high quality content.
Marketing & SEO Tools
Glazed Builder empowers your marketing team by giving them the freedom to be creative. Designing landing pages that convert, personalized call to action buttons, including and editing global blocks are just few of the many features Glazed Builder has to offer. Moreover Glazed comes pre-installed with a number of 35 ready-to-go elements for building any type of content. The elements are divided into four categories: layout elements, content elements, media elements and interactive elements. Every element is fully customizable and can be personalized to meet the website’s overall design feel and your marketing strategy. Any type of content you create on your website is mobile-friendly right away. SEO managed right within the builder. You can easily add alt and title text to images, fully control your header tags, always get clean markup and fast performance. Our clean markup makes it easier for you to rank above your competitors in Google search results.
What's next for Sooperthemes?
After just uploading new 11 tutorial videos to the Sooperthemes YouTube channel I'm looking back at our first videos and see a lot of improvement. We're going to continue focussing even more on video content. Documentation is something very difficult to get right but when you do get it right it's very rewarding.
In 2019 we're also going to develop more advanced features and integration for our core products. Glazed Builder is going to get more capabilities geared to large enterprise users and Glazed theme is simply in need of constant updates just in order to keep up with design trends. The power of the Glazed theme framework is that you can keep the same theme for 5 years and instead of having a dated looking website at the end of the line you can just update some settings and get right look for your brand.
A big milestone we're going to be working towards is a Bootstrap 4 update, probably coming in Q3 or Q4. Right now our customers are successful with Bootstrap 3 so it's not an urgent issue but eventually Bootstrap 4 will become the new standard across the Drupal community.
3 years ago when just releasing Glazed Builder the product was received well by early adopters and considered an "awesome tool". 3 years later we're seeing mainstream adoption and clients describing Glazed Builder as "basically a must-have to start a Drupal project". We hope to continue playing an important role to the Drupal community, as well as presenting a more modern and capable Drupal to potential Drupal adopters outside the community!