Project Politika, Help Design a Free GPL Drupal Theme

November 13, 2023

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!

Division of project:

Sooperthemes:

  1. Art Direction
  2. Graphic/UX design
  3. Drupal theming
  4. Documentation

Community:

  1. Type of website for which this theme will be designed (blog /portal/ media/ multimedia/etc..)
  2. General directions for the style, atmosphere and design stream (e.g. minimal/clean vs web2.0 vs glossy)
  3. Recommendations of modules and content types to be supported and designed

Guesstimated timeline:

June/July 2010: Collecting information

July 2010: Being on vacation resisting the urge to make design mock-ups

August 2010: Providing some design mock-ups for the community to choose from

September-??? 2010: Production. The theme will be full featured like the premium themes and these usually take around 8-10 weeks to go through the design/development/testing/QA loops before they are ready for release.

Schedule for june

  1. June 7th (mon): Present and discuss project
  2. June 9th (wed): Discuss Theme purpose (type of website)
  3. June 14th (mon): Poll for theme purpose
  4. June 16th (wed): Discuss design style
  5. June 21th (mon): Poll for design style
  6. June 23th (wed): Discuss modules and features
  7. June 28th (mon): Questionnaire about modules and features
  8. June 30th (mon): Summary of poll and questionnaire results

What can you do now?

I will post a poll about the type of website that we want to design a theme for next Wednesday the 9th of june.

Start getting some inspiration from sites like http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites and http://drupal.org/forum/25 and http://www.designfridge.co.uk/ and http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/ and http://www.smashingmagazine.com/ or wherever you like to get inspired so that you can contribute to the polls and discussions that I will post to get the an idea of what the community wants :). It is always nice if you can make reference to websites or case studies (ie from Drupal.org) if you post comments with ideas.

I think the best way to discuss and decide about the design process is something like this:

  1. Have a discussion about a step in the design process
  2. I analyze the comments and try to summarize them into a poll, and then in the poll the majority decides.

This project depends on your input, so do not hesitate to comment or email. I will manage the project on this blog, on facebook/twitter and via the Drupal.org project page but most communications for development will take place on this blog, using the politika tag. The easiest way to follow the project is the subscribe to the global RSS feed which combines sooperthemes.com content with twitter. If you dont use an RSS reader but you do use facebook, the Sooperthemes facebook page is connected to this RSS feed!

What can you expect?

I will make this free theme at least as good as the premium themes and if people come up with cool ideas I have no problem making custom features or jquery plugins to make it work. Expect this for sure:

  • GPL license for Design, Theme, CSS and whatever javascript code is made for this theme and hopefully the theme can go fully on Drupal.org. (depends on whether non-GPL font/libraries or icons are needed)
  • Cross browser compatibility
  • Fixed and flexible width configuration, separate left/right sidebar width control
  • SooperFish dropdown menus
  • Sooper FontKit integration with hopefully a perfect-fitting free font
  • Skinr integration with some distuingished block styles and with grid controls
  • Full Color module integration! Including support for image re-coloring
  • Sooper Starterkit (a Drupal install profile with database to load demo content)
  • Design & Theming for book module, comments, webform module, Poll module, user profiles, taxonomy, twitter module