Blueprint CSS Framework and Drupal

blueprint-framework.pngBuilding website templates and themes can be a real pain. Not only do you need to layout your site, setup your columns, and get everything just how you want it you have to check it out in a half dozen different browsers to get it working for everyone out there. That's where the Blueprint CSS Framework comes in. It's designed to take a lot of the legwork out of taking a design and making it work for the web. Now, Ted Serbinski has released a Blueprint CSS starter theme for drupal.

This theme combines a bunch of slick drupal theming techniques along with the Blueprint CSS Framework providing for what looks like a great tool to use in theme building.

Some of the drupal highlights:

  • Automatically adds META description to many pages.
  • Automatically adds META keywords if taxonomy exists on that node.
  • SEO optimization without the need for heavy modules and additional queries per page.
  • Improve forum display and performance.
  • Prevents duplicate form submissions with jQuery.

If you are someone who wants to learn a bunch of great tricks for theming drupal check out the template.php file for this theme.

Some CSS Highlights:

  • Normalizes Drupal’s CSS to be consistent.
  • Flexible layout, from 1 to 3 columns, based on where you configure your blocks to show (left, center, right).
  • Highlight any comments by the author of the node.

There is a lot more CSS magic than just these.

If you want to see some of this work in the wild check out Teds blog, MothersClick, and MomBlogNetwork. This looks like a powerful tool and I plan on using it the next time I get to create a theme.

oh man!

oh man, you gotta be kidding me. This looks great.
I looked at blueprint CSS a while back but because I am a CSS guy, I found it easier to just write the code and not use the framework, but since it is now a starter theme for Drupal, I need to test it.

This will make CSS building easier for lots of folks, and help get some better designed themes in Drupal.

Cool..

Cool... I'm wondering what people are using as a CSS framework for Drupal and just came across this.