We know we have passionate Web developers when they love using their free time to keep on coding. We shared previously about our developer Ben’s WordPress theme and today we are sharing about our application developer Patrick’s Drupal Base Building Blocks theme.
What is Drupal?
Drupal is an open source content management system that is written in PHP. It’s also a community of developers that build extensions to the Drupal CMS (modules and themes) and work on Drupal Core.
Why did you want to create a theme for Drupal?
There are great base themes for Drupal available, but I didn’t find myself using them for one reason or another. I noticed a number of things that I did every time I created Drupal themes, so to help me save time I started building a simple base theme.
When I added Bootstrap to the project it became more complex because a lot has to be done to ensure Bootstrap works well with Drupal. Now there is also a Base Building Blocks Module that adds Bootstrap elements in the form of submodules (like the navbar blocks, carousel blocks, etc.), and this helps me save even more time because I can easily build a bootstrap-dependant module and use it over and over again.
When did you create the Base Building Blocks theme?
I started the initial base theme two years ago and slowly built from there. I released it on Github in June 2012.
Why should developers choose Base Building Blocks theme over another theme?
If a Web developer is looking for an HTML5 boilerplate, Bootstrap-ed base theme for Drupal, then I think the developer will find Base Building Blocks to be a helpful tool.
How many people have used Base Building Blocks?
I’m not sure of the exact number, but I know at least ten companies are using it to build their clients’ Drupal sites. The github repo has 42 watchers at the moment, and I’m working toward putting the project on drupal.org. That’s when it will most likely become more useful to more people.
Are you thinking of creating any other themes?
I have been considering building a branch for Base Building Blocks that uses Zurb Foundation as opposed to Bootstrap — both are awesome CSS/JS libraries! I have also worked on a CodeIgniter theming system, and its theme looks similar to Base Building Blocks.
Why do you enjoy creating themes?
Writing JavaScript/HTML/CSS is usually relatively simple and enjoyable. It’s nice to see the harder code work that has been done to properly store and manage data implemented in a beautiful interface. Also, as we all know, creating good user experience for an application/website is a very important part of making it a successful product.
Anything else you would like to add?
If you use Base Building Blocks in a project, please let me know what your experience was, what you thought was good and what you thought needed improvement. It’s all about collaboration.
To learn more about Fahrenheit Marketing’s talented Web developers and how we can help your company, contact us today.