Before jumping into the release blog post I wanted to repond to the recent Drupal Planet blog posts about the fact that Drupal 8 has so few themes. In my opinion the short answer is: Drupal 8 adoption is very slow.

The slightly longer answer is that Drupal also faces more competition in the lower end of the market, where themes are most often used. WordPress' growth has been great and is now stagnating, but online site builders like Wix, Weebly, and squarespace are growing and their products are maturing. Another factor that I think relates to Drupal 8's slow adoption especially in the lower end of the market is that Drupal 8 will rely more on distributions due to increased complexity of assembling a fully featured site. As someone who manage a Drupal distribution full time I can tell you it's not as easy as it should be.

Glazed 2.5.3 Release

Today we release what is just the start of a new class of Drupal themes. Over the past year our Glazed theme and Carbide Builder combo has stabilized and proven it's capabilities. With our latest Landscaping Theme Demo we are showing that our framework theme is capable of so much more than your average Multipurpose WordPress theme or Bootstrap template. With refined design options and microinteractions we are pushing our Glazed framework theme forward to make way for a future full of beautiful, effective Drupal theme designs. New header options were added, our main menu system got some improvements.. 

TL;DR

• Added pull-down header design
• Improved overlay menu style
• Support for transparent and full-width menus
• New minimalistic form theming
• New design for portfolio pages
• Image Compare 
• Lightbox Gallery for portfolio pages
• Next / Previous node pager
• CHANGELOG Glazed Theme
• CHANGELOG Carbide Builder

Glazed Landscaping Theme

As you can see on our roadmap SooperThemes is currently focussing on designing a large collection of Business niche themes based on our Glazed framework Drupal theme and Carbide Drag and Drop Builder. Our most recent addition is Landscaping and Gardening theme. We are not in the business of designing generic niche themes, we aim to release the best niche themes. We developed additional features for this theme including a unique new header and main menu design, an image comparison widget and a lightbox gallery option for portfolio pages. 

Check out the Landscaping & Gardening live demo to view our latest niche theme!

New Header Options

While designing new niche theme I quickly realised that our generic bootstrap navbar layout was the most important bottleneck preventing us from producing truly great niche business website designs. The Glazed Settings for the header were refactored, optimized and extended with new style options and 11 new color options. These options are now also made available in our Glazed Content Design field collection so that you can customize headers for specific landing pages and match your creative content. 

You can now view all these header in our live demo under the new Headers Dropdown menu!

Image Compare, Lightbox and Portfolio Page Design

For a landscaping business it's important to showcase your best work to potential customers. The portfolio content type was extended with additional layout options. New features include a Next / Previous node pager at the bottom, an advanced lightbox gallery system for viewing portfolio images and last but not least: an image comparison widget. The comparison widget really makes your case studies stand out, providing an effective and fun way to demonstrate the awesome service your business provided to your customer.

The comparison widget is touchscreen compatible and responsive. 

New Form  Design & Theming

The default Bootstrap 3 forms already started looking dated. We replaced it with a minimalistic new design. Forms now blend in perfectly with any design. Form elements are sublty colored only when interacted with. The selectbox now features are custom themed dropdown icon that is themed using the default font that you configured in Glazed Settings. The selectbox also sports are a subtle microinteraction animation when hovered.

The Landscaping contact form uses the webform bootstrap 3 layout module.

Looking Ahead

In the future look forward to more Drupal Niche Business themes, as well as our move into Magazine themes. WordPress magazine themes have seen a surge in sales on themeforest recently and I think there is oppurtunity for Drupal to shine in this growing market. After all, Drupal is naturally best at managing large amounts  of structured content and magazines are just that. Combine that with the capability of our drag and drop builder to easily generate attractive creative content and there you have a basis for best-in-class magazine themes. If you are interested in joining our little theme shop you can join now for just $48.