It's The Details That Make A Good Product Great: Glazed Theme 2.6.3 And Builder 1.1.2 Updates!
It's the details that make the difference between a good product and a great product. The past 6 weeks were spent on refining the design patterns that constitute the Glazed branding and products. The result is a product that feels tight and inspires confidence. Just 2 years young, Glazed Builder is the new kid on the block but the progress since 1.0 has never slowed down. With the seeminlgy everlasting lack of quality Drupal themes for Drupal 7 and especially 8 I think that with Glazed Theme and Glazed Builder we have the platform that is needed to really fuse Drupal's powerful backend with beautiful designs in a maintainable, responsible way. In the future we'll be working hard on realizing this ambition, and publishing new designs for different niches.
The Admin demo is free, no registration required!
Better Controls Positioning
Glazed Builder is different from consumer tools like Wix and Squarespace because it doesn't put limitations on where you place elements. Our grid system is based on bootstrap and our tools allow you to use Bootstrap elements like you would if you were custom coding. You're coding without having to write or see the code. The consequence was that sometimes nested rows, tabs, accordeons etc. had so many controls that they could overlap.
This problem is was not easily solved, that is probably why you find very few drag and drop builders without some restrictions to where you place your elements. With this week's release the problem is no longer a problem. We're introducing a new algorithm for controls positioning. Thanks to advancements in browser APIs it's now feasible to do hit detection efficiently. This means we create space for icons when necessary, but we leave the layout intact where we can. This doesn't just solve the overlapping controls problem but also creates a much closer WYSIWYG experience.
Performance Improvements for Theme and Builder
With Mobile performance more important than ever it's our responsibility to be vigilant about performance and take action when we see opportunity for improvement. One such improvement is our menu system. Our unique mobile menu provides an unparalleled navigation experience, and uses a bit of JavaScript to manage this. This caused a menu flickering on long page because the menu initiation happened close to the bottom of the page. This code was moved to the beginning of the page to speed up the menu render.
Other improvements have been made by replacing jQuery with browser native APIs, partly using the new knowledge that was gained from creating our unique controls positioning algorithm.
Material Style Box Shadows
Material Design box shadows are now available in the style tab using a simple slider. The slider represents the "surface level" metaphor used in Material Design's documentation and it renders elegant and simple shadows that are taken directly from Google's recommendations about drop shadows in Material Design..
Ready for Drupal 8
We're currently developing the Drupal 8 version of the Glazed installation profile and we are starting to upgrade our theme and modules. We previsouly aimed to release our Drupal 8 beta alongside the Drupal 8.3 release, but now that the D8media initiative has postponed their work to be released in Drupal 8.4 we are relaxing this deadline.
We're taking our time to make the right decisions about our installation profile, our theme, our drag and drop builder, and all the thousands of lines of code that make up our themes and demo websites. Expect to see Drupal 8 beta products somewhere after the 8.3 release of Drupal core and before the 8.4 release.
For more details about this week's updates:
The Admin demo is free, no registration required!