The Blueprint theme is a starter Drupal theme based on the Blueprint CSS framework, an open-source project designed to provide site designers with a solid foundation for building upon. The framework features a tableless, grid-based layout that allows site designers to quickly and easily build sites by specifying both column widths and column spans at the CSS level. It also provides strong default typography and a separate CSS file for printing.
After downloading the Blueprint module from Drupal.org, be sure to also download the Blueprint CSS framework as specified in the module's readme.txt file. This separate download is necessary due to license restrictions.
The attached screenshot shows a "grid test" from the framework's site demonstrating the flexibility of the layout system.
Stats
- Learning curve: medium
- Depth: deep, all but the most complex layouts can be accomplished with the Blueprint CSS framework
- Resources:
- Blueprint CSS Framework home page (includes examples and framework download)
- Crash course on using Blueprint with Drupal - a very short, but informative blog post
- Download this theme from the official Drupal.org project page
New to Drupal? Here's a recipie for disaster: you're building a site for a client and need to create a new theme. You think to yourself, "hmmmm, since the Garland theme is the default Drupal theme, that seems like a good place to start...", so you blindly forge ahead by duplicating the Garland theme, renaming it to "coolest_theme_evah", and place it in your sites/all/themes folder (because you would never hack core, would you?) How'd that work out for you? Did you find Garland easy to modify? Did you find its CSS easy to understand?
Been there. Done that. Not proud.
How about this: have you ever built a theme from scratch? You have? That's just crazy talk! That would be like writing a content management system from scratch.
Been there. Done that. Not proud.
There's a better way. Actually, there's a lot of better ways, but only one worth mentioning in this context. Start with Blueprint. Trust me.
The Blueprint theme is a great place to start. Why, you ask? Lemme tell ya:
- Normalized CSS to make sure all browsers start on equal footing: check
- Easy to adjust, flexible column widths: check
- Built-in SEO stuff: check
- Moves javascript to the bottom of the page for performance gains: check
There's a whole bunch of additional features, but you can read all about them on the official download page.
Theming in Drupal is hard enough, give yourself a leg-up and start at a reasonable place. Blueprint is one such place.