Theme

Back in the day I used to roll with good old CSS and it did the job. Mostly because it didn't need any special maintaining and the code was simple.

Things changed when I first started working on some more beefy projects. Changing of various stuff followed by constant modifying of css was truly a pain in the ass, you ask why? Simply because there was so much css that maintaining caused severe pain in my head.

I'm sure a lot of people would agree that CSS can easily become a mess, no matter how careful you are.. Although Compass won't solve this problem completely, it will make your work more comfortable.

This article should serve as an informative post to all you guys writing regular CSS to consider using a preprocessor.

What is Compass?

A quote from the official website "Compass is an open-source CSS Authoring Framework" which pretty much sums it up.

Think of it as a CSS with extras or just CSS having Tom Selleck's moustache.. Wait what ?

American actor Thomas William "Tom" Selleck

Why Compass?

I'm not the programming type of guy, so I was kinda afraid at first(you know, command line and stuff).

Performance optimization is a key element of every website development and often is not considered in the process of designing and theming. We have put together several tips which can help you to improve your site's performance from the Drupal's front-end perspective. I hope you will find these tips useful.

Source: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow

Use YSlow to identify problems

As on most of our projects we use YSlow as a tool for front-end performance testing and optimization. It helps us to identify problems and suggest a way to improve performance based on the set of rules for high performance websites.

Are you sick of hearing "Drupal is ugly"? Are you devoted to change that and make Drupal sites look awesome? Join other Drupal designers and start sharing and promoting your designs, write blog posts and making the Drupal side of Internet prettier. Some of the planned features/ideas for Drupaldesigners.org:

• Drupal theming & design posts aggregator like Drupal Planet
• Interviews with best designers
• Help designers to know Drupal best practises
• Bring designers of awesome Drupal websites out of anonymity
• Creative process of a designer
• Workflow of a Drupal themer
• Design case studies
• Closing the gap between Drupal designers and themers

Subscribe on Drupaldesigners.org to stay tuned on latest news or follow @drupaldesigners on Twitter

If you are a website designer, you probably know that having a clear and well prepared style guide can save an enormous amount of time for developer and save the designer from having to explain the design details over and over. That's why I have created a blank website style guide template. I hope it will enable designers to speed up their design process and bring more beautiful designs to our community. As a Drupal designer I hope it could be used as a Photoshop styleguide for more Drupal designers.

A fully layered, well documented, blank Photoshop PSD template, with all design elements, typography tags, comments, ads, poll and many more, to speed up your design process and make your developers happier. It’s well documented layers make it super easy to adjust it to your needs, apply layer styles and add colors or effects as needed. Using the 960px grid system with guidelines makes layout rearranging a matter of seconds.

This tempalte was made based on a design I made for NDN.org and sponsored by CivicActions - a Drupal company I worked for.

Download the Free Website Style Guide Photoshop Template

Drupal is one of the most powerful open source content management system, voted by community and professionals as the best Open Source CMS in last two years. I have built many websites with Drupal, and found it a great solution for almost all kind of websites from simple blog to large corporate presentations. If you don't know Drupal, or want to know more about it, watch the great Drupal song and take a look at the About section of drupal.org