Magrid

Info

Magrid (Short for "My grid based theme") aims to be a neat, lean and from scratch neutral looking Drupal 7 theme, with intent to keep as much flexibility as possible from the bottom to the top, delivering free choice of css grids, columns, layouts, responsive webdesign (inkl. IE 6-9), vertical rythm, sprites and many on/off configuration options by default.

For support or if you would like to co-maintain feel free to post in the issue queue.

Why?

Magrid is not a typical starter theme nor a base theme system. It is what you would like to have on hand when you need a site up and running now, and not in 3 weeks. It is what you need when you don't want to learn another system nor a theme logic leading to a boring or all the same looking result, whatever you do. Starter themes and 1 single css grid based themes often suffer from their clickable options and fixed column grids to aim to be flexible but rather become unflexible because of the confusion by wrapping around their functions and grids or by accidently modifiying files which deliver the basic theme functionality. The most of the so been called "complete starterkits" are loaded with many options namely, but most of them doesn't change the feel of the site that much really, which leads to a copy of the basetheme without a real individual touch and feel. That's where we came from and had the idea, that it must be possible to have fastly modifiable options without loss of flexibility and overview.

Details

We choose other priorities depending the on/off scenarios and have implemented options for:

1. the look and feel of the comment filter tips
2. the vertical or horizonal feel of the whole web project
3. jQuery based background animation scripts
4. a draggable developer region
5. multiple! css grid support
6. including switches between horizonal and vertical flow, full width, fixed width and centered pages for core nodes, Display Suite nodes and Views
7. color module and skinr support (not required!)
8. support for several jQuery styling plugins

You can also switch between different ordering of the node-teaser lists on frontpage and term filtered node-teaser lists, like:

1. newspaper-style
2. blog-style
3. foto-table
4. masonry/isotope fluid grid and more.

We wanted to create a theme which can still be modified the usual way (css, tpl, etc) but doesn't remains of also being feature-packed with functions and grids to gain responsive layout results briefly, but without loosing vertical rythm. We use that theme for all of our projects, and none of them looks like the other. The theme is extandable by any grid you wish to add an can keep your basic layout fitting to it. We decided to contribute it to drupal.org.

The theme also provides additional css files to give you access to regular resets, Drupal resets, reusable grouped class presets for use with css class input fields (like in Views or Display Suite) and classes for creating rounded borders, grid-fitting margin/padding presets, and presets for teasers, views, blocks and regions.

Regions

We don't believe that a ton of hardcoded regions in page.tpl.php make really sense in a scalable framework like Drupal, since the basic layout may be in need of change under certain circumstances. Thats what we have created the css class logic for. Magrid supports the minimum of needed regions and minimizes the tons of nested divs to be handsome under every possible base layout:

Header, Top Navigation, Content Before, Content, Content After, Sidebar first, Sidebar second, Bottom Navigation, Footer.

Recommendations

To have as much flexibility as possible we recommend to use content region for most of your blocks. The theme is prepared to render them nicely side by side, depending on the layout you choose. That makes it possible to easely have responsive design out of the box. A column feel can also be generated by using the right grid options and classes. A documentation will follow. Feel free to post issues. That would make the theme solid rock as soon as possible.

Future plans

1. EXT JS 4 Framework support
2. Sprites and choosable icon sets.
3. adding modernizr and such support