Glazed Drupal CMS 1.0 and Glazed Premium 2.4.8 Arrived: Cool New Features and Better Views Integration
Glazed Drupal CMS 1.0
After over 100 git commits over 4 weeks, including weekends and late nights I can present to you Glazed 2.4.8. This release includes not only an update to the premium Drupal theme and the drag and drop builder: the Glazed Drupal CMS distribution on drupal.org finally reached the 1.0 milestone! The backend distribution started as an experiment 2 years ago. I tried to find the perfect bundle of features to jump-start development of Drupal CMS websites.After nearly 100 beta releases I finally settled on the formula for features and flexibility that is now in the Glazed Drupal CMS 1.0 release. To make the distribution truly useful, it of course had to have a beautiful theme, and the distro now includes a free slimmed down version of our best-selling Glazed framework theme: Glazed Free.
Glazed Drupal CMS 1.0 Features
- Fully Loaded WYSIWYG Editor
- Built In Media Library
- Glazed Free Theme included
- Multilevel Responsive Main Menu
- Blog Content & Views
- Portfolio Content & Views
- Event Content & Views
- Event Registration
- News Content & Views
- Bootstrap 3 integrated
- SEO Optimized
- Demo Content Included
Glazed Drupal CMS on Drupal.org
Glazed 2.4.8 Comes with a ton of improvements, bug fixes and shiny new demo pages!
Glazed 2.4.8 Release Highlights
Search all the things!
Full screen search is a really exciting new UI feature in Glazed. Search is becoming a key factor in navigation on increasingly large and dynamic websites. Thanks to our full screen search design you can provide a unified search experience no mobile and desktop. The search feature is based on Drupal's core search, with just a theming and behavioral overlay by Glazed. This means you can use all your favorite search modules and plugins along with our full screen UI.
We added this search enhancement with the goal of powering larger, more dynamic sites. If you have any ideas to further improve our search be sure to hit the comments! (One thing I'm looking at is using the Fast Autocomplete fac module).
Stunning Animations At Your Fingertips
It has never been easier to create stunning animations. We added a new demo page to to showcases our newly added floating animation. This page is also great for learning how you can use animations and apply in your own projects. If you are interested in our improved animation features check out the animation page. If you want to try the animation engine, to spin up a private demo at trysooperthemes.com.
My goal at Sooperthemes is to strike a balance between features, performance, and usability. I actually cut the animate.css library in half, because it had some many animations that are just ridiculous and have no place in a professional product. I then added the custom floating animation for our new Apple style demo page and the whole animation library clocks in at just 4kb. It only loads on pages with animations, because we care about performance.
Enjoy easy animations for callouts, meaningful content enhancement or simply to impress your client or improve website visitor engagement. Or just for fun, but don't overdo it.
GridStack Views: Stack Your Featured Content
We've been working on features that will be used for our future Magazine designs for Glazed. This is one of them. Using the GridStack JS library and our easy to use Views integration, you can create dynamic "stacks" of your most important content. The views plugin gives you total control over layout, gap size, colors, all inside the Views module. You can use it for homepage headers, footers, or even for a full-page gridstack with all your content!
This is one of those little features that make your content more fun to interact with, and more personalized.
Creating custom stacks:
Carousels For All Content
There are 2 kinds of sliders in our Glazed Builder drag and drop tool. This first is a Bootstrap based simple image slider. Then There is the Carousel Element, which is like a swiss army knife of sliders. It will do regular sliders, fading sliders, carousels, and more. It will slide anything you throw at it, including videos, images, and HTML content with layouts.
The Carousel element gives you the awesome power of the Owl Carousel library at your fingertips. Here is an example slider that I created by copying the Position Elements container demo contet in 2 slides:
View Positioned Layers Demo Page
Improving Drupal Views Integration
The most exciting improvements in 2.4.8 to me are all in the Views integration. We tested and improved exposed filter integration. The awesome power of views' exposed filters and sorting is that unlike with contextual filters you get a human-friendly form that allows you to personalize the view. When exposing a category filter, you get a nice hierarchical selectbox to choose a category. When you want to expose something more massive like a node:author field you can use an autocomplete field.
The power of views integration will become more obvious when we start release magazine designs for Glazed. Keep an eye on the blog/newsletter!
New Pages in the Glazed 2.4.8 Main Demo
All new and updated demo pages:
- Animation Engine
- Carousel
- Positioned Elements
- Social Links
- GridStack
- Google Maps
- Icons
- Drupal Blocks
- Drupal Views
- Drop Shadows
- Motion Boxes
- Portfolio (now with 4:3 image styles)
- Tabs
- Video Element
- Image Slider & Element
- Revolution Slider
For a complete list of changes check out the Glazed and Glazed Builder changelogs:
CHANGELOG Glazed Theme
CHANGELOG Glazed Builder
Improving Drupal's Distribution Experience
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Since Distribtuions were announced as a feature for Drupal I thought it was a great idea, and now Sooperthemes is working on making distributions even better. I think we are the first distribution to have a custom build option but that is just the beginning. We are currently testing Auto-Deploy & Install tools that we've been working on for 4 months. (Think fully automatic deployment and installation on your server or even shared hosting).
Bonus GIF
Here's a GIF image of our completely re-architected multi-level responsive main menu:
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Have a great day!