Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.2011 has been a great year for Drupal and indeed Adaptivetheme has again gone from strength to strength and now clearly dominates its vertical as the most popular end user centric responsive base theme for Drupal.
In 2011 the major focus was new features to support the rise of mobile, HTML5, and user experience. In 2012 I'm going to continue that evolution, and to turn my sights to the future and where I believe ALL Drupal themes will be heading come the end of 2012 - we want to start down this road now, early, so we're once again leading the pack when the time comes.
It's my vision that come 2013 and Drupal 8 (I did say I'm looking at the future right?), all Drupal themes will use a Panels Everywhere-esque type system. Everything will be a block or block-like component that you can move around using the user interface. Right now only Panels Everywhere offers this type of feature - its easy to use, powerful and places full control in the hands of non-coders, and most importantly allows you to leverage the powerful context features of CTools, Views and Panels.
Lets be clear about this - no other system, module or theme offers the ease of use and flexibility that Panels Everywhere can offer. It is no accident that leading companies such as Node One leverage PE in their distributions such as Node Stream (completely amazing, you really must try it!).
Here is a short roadmap of where things will be heading in 2012:
1. Responsive Panels - baked in CSS/Media query overrides for all Panel layouts. These will work for any Adaptivetheme variant, either the base core theme, subthemes and the Panels Everywhere variant. Issue #1332796: Make Panels layouts responsive Now looking for feedback regarding a UI for this: #1447426: Design and build UI for Responsive Panels Layout Options
2. AT Panels Everywhere D7 Upgrade - full upgrade to Drupal 7 for the AT Panels Everywhere theme. Issue: #1148328: Drupal 7 port of AT Panels Everywhere
3. Stacked Responsive Gpanels - 9 new layouts (minimum) that largely emulate the panels layouts (for those not using Panels or Panels Everywhere modules and who prefer the lighter Gpanels approach for Drupal 7). Issue: #1336768: Stacked Gpanels
Refinement, bug fixing, possibly even new features will be added to the core Adaptivetheme - its vitally important I build on the great foundations laid in 2011 - do not think I am moving off into new territory without first and foremost looking after the core theme. However we must look to the future and start to build out these new Responsive Panels centric features, new variants such as AT Panels Everywhere for Drupal 7, and take into account that Panels is really the future of layout, context, and end user friendly features. Its time for the Great Leap Forward!
Got anything you want to add? Tell me about it.
Comments
Comment #0.0
Jeff Burnz CreditAttribution: Jeff Burnz commentedUpdated issue summary.
Comment #0.1
Jeff Burnz CreditAttribution: Jeff Burnz commentedUpdated issue summary.
Comment #0.2
Jeff Burnz CreditAttribution: Jeff Burnz commentedUpdated issue summary.
Comment #1
Stan Turyn CreditAttribution: Stan Turyn commentedI really like the roadmap, especially with regards to Panels Everywhere.
And this - "full upgrade to Drupal 7 for the AT Panels Everywhere theme", gets my vote.
Comment #2
andypostIt could be a great feature for D8 to have a customizable "layout builder" in core
Comment #3
Jeff Burnz CreditAttribution: Jeff Burnz commentedThat is the plan - the idea is that it will be a lot like panels but with a much improved UI.
Comment #4
nikkubhai CreditAttribution: nikkubhai commentedWow..Great plan.. Thank you so much :)
Comment #5
SocialNicheGuru CreditAttribution: SocialNicheGuru commentedLooks great. Will this include support for features, spaces, and context (http://drupal.org/project/context)
Comment #6
Jeff Burnz CreditAttribution: Jeff Burnz commentedSuch as? Why does a theme need to have specific support for these modules, those are NOT theme layer modules, they are CONTEXT modules, two entirely different things. This issue is for PANELS LAYOUT support, that is what a theme should do - provide STYLE, not site BUSINESS LOGIC as some other misguided themes for Drupal seem to think is a good idea...
Comment #7
videographics CreditAttribution: videographics commentedJeff, thank you so much for your clear and forward thinking on this. I especially appreciate your emphasis on the separation of STYLE and BUSINESS LOGIC. I think this is a good concept to foster as a basic design principal for Drupal site developers as well as a best practice design principal for theme developers. I think we've all seen it happen... you get deeper and deeper into development on a site using a particular theme and before you know it, you're at the point where it's virtually impossible to swap themes without rendering (NPI) the site totally useless. The more we can do to maintain that magical ability to transform the look of the site without significantly impacting its function, the better. Virtually any site can benefit from 'upgrading' its theme from time to time. It's a key advantage to using a theme-based CMS like Drupal. I'd hate to see that advantage dissipate over time as a result of themers ignoring this issue as they look for ways to distinguish themselves.
I think it's becoming much less of a problem these days, but I think this is somewhat analogous to this issue... Think of that module you once loaded up that had so much 'style' built into it that it looked exactly the same everywhere – regardless of the theme – and you had to totally 'redesign' it to make it look right on your site. Didn't you just hate that? I think making an effort to avoid similar problems from the theming side of things is a very important concept to promote. Go Jeff!
Comment #8
Jeff Burnz CreditAttribution: Jeff Burnz commentedOK, the first phase is getting close, I have posted an update here: #1332796: Make Panels layouts responsive
Comment #8.0
Jeff Burnz CreditAttribution: Jeff Burnz commentedUpdated issue summary.
Comment #9
Jeff Burnz CreditAttribution: Jeff Burnz commentedSecond phase, needs feedback #1447426: Design and build UI for Responsive Panels Layout Options
Comment #9.0
Jeff Burnz CreditAttribution: Jeff Burnz commentedUpdated issue summary.
Comment #10
Jeff Burnz CreditAttribution: Jeff Burnz commentedGonna mark this as fixed for now, although there a few features in the new 7.x-3.x version that I want to backport, such as being able to disable responsiveness.
Comment #11
Volx CreditAttribution: Volx commentedGreat work! Do have any idea when there will be a 3.0 release and what is preventing a release?
Comment #12
Jeff Burnz CreditAttribution: Jeff Burnz commentedVolx - testing, the more people who test it the quicker it can be released, includes you ;)
Comment #13
Jeff Burnz CreditAttribution: Jeff Burnz commentedJust a few words about testing this - areas to specifically focus on:
First -pull the latest code from GIT, or check the last commit and see the DEV is up to date, there were some encoding issues that were fixed today, they caused big problems in the generated stylesheets.
- Panels: testing the layouts and making sure they respond to different breakpoints
- Gpanels: same testing, do they respond correctly
Both will respond, but are they correct?
There are some new theme settings - are these working on your system OK, e.g.:
- Disable Responsive Layout (this should work always), and if so the "lt ie9" conditional stylesheet should NOT load when responive capability is OFF. Nor should any of the responsive stylesheets either. This seems rock solid at the moment, I have tested it quite a bit myself.
- Mobile first or Desktop first - I am writing an entire article about just this subject and how AT 7.x-3.x changes to support each approach, suffice to say all I we are really interested in is the cascade - is the layout responding correctly under both approaches?
- Enable respond.js and test with IE8, if respond.js is OFF IE6,7,8 get a default layout based on the Standard layout and Panel/Gpanel default layouts - I have taken a true "Mobile First" approach with this theme, rather than a "media queries" first approach (i.e. it can and will support all mobile devices, not just those that support media queries).
- debug settings - are these working for you, can they be improved, test them out, see what you think. I find the "Window Size" setting to be most useful.
I'm working on a big article about this theme that goes into some depth about each of the features and really digs into how-to-do Mobile First design with this new version, there are many new tools and goodies (many of them happen without you even knowing about it), so its worth exploring things in detail - for example how the stylesheets are loaded, why, when and what is in them is interesting.
Look at the 3 generated stylesheets in files/at_css/ for your theme and watch how they change as you select various Global Settings or change the layout for the Page or Panels.
Comment #14
Stan Turyn CreditAttribution: Stan Turyn commentedPlease make sure to post the link to that article here when published.
Comment #15.0
(not verified) CreditAttribution: commentedUpdated issue summary.