Singular theme to rule them ALL!

Yay! OSSCube and related micro-sites powered by Singular theme (Drupal 6).

Singular theme

As the OSSCube progressing with time and exploring more markets. Exploring & hitting on new territories.

The time for makeover for the old site. Looks needs to be more polished, dynamic and professional. And the old site sucks BIG! at typographical level.

That was the most major reason to polish the site and commence the retheming (drupal themer/coder perspective) or I would like to say realignment phase (saving time and efforts to reach to the desired result). And not changing the architecture level of the site.

To serve this requirement, i come up with concept of single theme named Singular theme. And Singular theme is makeover of the land theme(old Drupal theme for osscube.com) which is initially based on garland theme.

Singular theme is a much compressed and carries no bull shit code from its parent theme. And have my best of the best efforts for Singular theme at that span of T.I.M.E.

All of the design decisions regarding alignment, the look and feel were taken solely be me.

Some of the salient points answered by Singular theme are as follows:

Less focus on image gradients. Heavy use of CSS3 based gradients. Few lines of code, That ease substantial amount of pain from the server in terms of HTTP request. (for eg. www.osscube.com/portfolio )
Making best use of Google font API. Using Droid Sans from Google font directory and going for fresh look as depicted in home page slider
Using CSS3 transition properties to have the APPEAL in the content, which responds to you hover interactions as in picture set osscube.com/resources/pictures Go and Play!
Writing highly scalable code, that helps to cut down the time and efforts for development and also for maintenance phase of the different version of the site. That also means in simple terms that other designer or UI person need not to put much efforts to chew the code. He can work straight through it.
First the Singular theme turn on www.osscube.com (here ‘s the tweet from timeline history) And later turned on other micro site and just visual level tweaks was just few hours job (if done well with focus!).
Changed completely the look of blog section. This page usage of CSS3 is very high in terms of drop shadows and gradients in right side bar. That also means major amount of time spent in browser rather in photo-editing app. following the Design in browser methodology.
There is no conditional css hack system to serve the IE browser (7,8 or 9 in future). A common css code in theme for all the majority of browser. That also means writing cross browser code in stylesheets.
Tested in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, IE7 and IE8. Infact tested in IE6 also. But not supported for IE6. Just wanted to see how ugly the site looks in this special version of IE browser.

In nutshell Looks Good and Loads up fast!

Talking on UI/UX is Good only If you are doing and implement it. Talking on it is very easy.

Will come back with some more good news.

Bye! for now : )

Filed under drupal realign retheming theming

3 notes &

October 2, 2010

The journey so far & going…

The below list feature some of the Robust scalable Web 2.0 Drupal powered site which i have delivered so far (taking care of UI and UX & employing agile web practices).

The list goes on as follows in chronological order: