Live Themer News

Livethemer: A way of life

For some time now (over 2 years actually!) Livethemer has consumed our time and attention. It's been lurking in the background, sometimes right up in our faces demanding more from us. It's been there waiting to take it's first walk out in the sun — to show off it's vibrant feathers and despite that it's not perfect, despite it's known bugs, it's ready. Ready to become not just our way of life but your way of life. Remembering that we believe Drupal is life, now hand-in-hand with Drupal, Livethemer is about to take its first step into the sunlight.

Beauty

Functionality is a huge key to a successful site, a successful product, a successful outcome for the end-user. Great coders are brilliant at working out the functionality. The ins and the outs of creating something that cleverly brings an outcome in a minimal number of lines. :) At Marmaladesoul we call that beauty in code. Clean, beautiful, crisp code that functionally achieves the goal.

A modular approach to Drupal theming: part 2

We recently discussed how we feel Drupal doesn't currently provide site administrators many tools to get in and leverage the powerful "backend" API's that Drupal provides to theme developers.

Live Themer is our answer to that question. At present it specifically exposes the following theme API concepts in a user friendly way:

A modular approach to Drupal theming: part 1

If you’re anything like us you love how modular Drupal is — it’s certainly one of the aspects that most attracted us to Drupal in the first place. A typical site starts with a small, minimal core to which you can add a multitude of contributed modules to create the finished site.

This has many obvious advantages, for example:

Wherefore art thou?

It’s been over six months now since we demo’d Live Themer actually working in Drupal 6 — we even built http://marmaladesoul.com using Live Themer in January to prove it was for real. The question then rose whether to go live for D6 or to upgrade to D7… and the consensus? Go for D7!

We’re very mindful of the time it’s taken to do the upgrade and get the module to release state, so we thought we’d fill you in on what's been consuming our time:

Introducing Live Themer

For a long time here at Marmaladesoul we’ve felt that Drupal has a missing link. Whilst we were hand-crafting one-off Drupal themes for our clients, we thought to ourselves "What would make this process more empowering to both our users and our developers?" This thought began to stir and brew and finally an epiphany: “How great would it be if we could expose some of the powerful backend Drupal theme layer to Drupal site administrators? Why not expose the theme hook suggestion system somehow? Variable overrides?” And thus began Live Themer.

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