For this month’s Drupal releases, we’ve chosen a timeless classic, along with a more modern, trendier companion. Considering that we only started doing Drupal themes when we already had 50+ WordPress themes available, it’s quite a challenge every month to pick the cream of the crop from that collection to be ported to Drupal. But we believe that regardless of that challenge, we’ve chosen a pretty cool mix for you this month…

Fresh News

First up is that golden oldie, Fresh News, which has been around since we first started WooThemes. It’s interesting to note that no other theme has been able to knock Fresh News off it’s #1 position as best-selling WooTheme ever. Furthermore, it has also been the one theme that has been ripped off most by other WP theme developers… So if imitation is the greatest form of flattery, then that’s enough evidence of Fresh News’ popularity and even more reason for you to grab it on Drupal now.

Daily Edition

And then onto another magazine & news theme beauty… Daily Edition.

Daily Edition was originally designed by Liam McKay to be the more modern & “big” brother to the hugely popular, Gazette Edition (another golden oldie courtesy of the “old days”). Since it’s release Daily Edition has slowly been working it’s way up our popularity charts and now sits comfortably in the Top 20 best-selling themes. Packed with all of the magazine-like goodness you need, along with a beautiful, minimalist design, Daily Edition is sure to take your Drupal website to a whole new level. See for yourself.

The Daily Modified Edition

When we recently came across Michael Hyatt‘s heavily modified version of Daily Edition, the whole WooTeam agreed that this was a modification done right. Extensive changes + beautiful execution = one of the best WooThemes modifications you’ll ever see.

Daily Edition

We know that many of our ExpressionEngine users have been begging us to release some news / magazine type themes for the platform (as these are severely lacking in the EE-world), so we figured that in addition to all-time best-seller, Fresh News, we should release current favourite, Daily Edition.

We’re obviously just happy to make it easy for you to run a content-heavy website on whatever CMS platform you decide to do that…

City Guide

This has been one of our most innovative themes to date (and judging by the Theme Leaderboard: definitely one that is popular with our users) and we’re so excited to bring this niche functionality to the EE platform as well.  Bjorn says it was a bit of a challenge to port City Guide to EE, but we’re extremely happy with the results and we look forward to hear what you guys & girls think of the theme after you’ve had a play… this theme could be a great start for a commercial “listings-site” for instance (think of what you can do with user submissions via SAEF, custom statuses for the listings (“Waiting for approval”), and subscription payments with Membrr.. the possibilities are endless).

Custom User Messages Template

All our themes now come bundled with Brian Litzinger’s excellent Cusom System Messages extension, so never again shall we see the default EE user messages dialog (.. and yes!, we haven’t forgotten about that SEO module either! We’ll keep improving the themes).

Liam kindly spent some time with us chatting through what was involved in his recent collaboration with WooThemes on the Daily Edition theme.

Working on a design for WooThemes isn’t like any other project. You’ve got to keep your mind on making something that not only looks fantastic to start, but something that can easily be customized in a variety of ways. The way I chose to get around this, on this project, was to offer something that quite minimalistic in design, but packed full of the features and special touches that users love to see in a WooThemes product.

By keeping the elements really clean and open I’ve left it wide open for Woo users to grab this and adapt it in their own unique ways. As the brief was for a more modern re-make of the Gazette theme I felt it was important to make the most of the special interactive features, and keep some of the charm that people love from that theme, but also make it distinctive enough to be different from the Gazette theme.

With so many different elements on the page it was important to establish an overall feel, but I spent quite a bit of time ensuring I had made the most of each section and element in turn. I’m happy with how everything turned out and I’m relieved that some of my experiments and ideas were welcomed by the community when the preview images were released.

Liam drew some inspiration from Fever

I wouldn’t say this was a minimalistic design though, not by any stretch, but I certainly was inspired by a lot of minimalistic designs and tried to bring as much of that as possible across in the design element. Sites such as http://feedafever.com, http://pixelbot.ro, http://headerfooter.com, http://www.rikcatindustries.com and http://www.designateonline.com/discussions/index.php really got my mind in the right place for making something with a lot of space and clarity. It was important to keep a lot of space without wasting space needlessly, I think it was all about finding that balance and still allowing for all of the special functions that the theme needed to have. It took a while finding something that looked spot on, but once it reaches that point you know right away!

Another big part of this project for me was the Wallpaper that WooThemes asked me to create. They put a lot of trust in me to come up with something that got the idea of theme theme across and create something that looked good enough for people to want to use as their desktop background. My idea was to make a wallpaper that included some big news stories from recent and past years, but I wanted to show them off in a way that made them look attractive and keep a positive feel on a mix of fantastic and horrific news stories. With that in mind I went for a very textured, soft and watercolor-like collage. Keeping the colors soft, and including a lot of space around the elements was done in an effort to reflect the characteristics of the theme. The idea to include news elements comes from the fact that you would class the theme as a premium News or Magazine theme and I’m sure that a lot of the users will be using the theme at some point in the future to document some very important and influential news, so it’s the users who’ll be making the news and it’s WooThemes who’s giving them the tools they need to do so.

All in all it was another project that I very much enjoyed thanks to the WooThemes team, one that gave me a lot to think about and a lot to do, but in the end one that I’m very proud of.

I’m excited about this theme! Almost a month after teasing you with some original screenshots of Liam Mckay’s awesome design we have finally completed the conversion to a flexible, neatly coded WordPress theme. You commented, and we listened and built some awesome functionality into this theme.

Breathing some new life into the incredible success of Gazette Edition we wanted another news/magazine based theme that was minimalistic enough to let your content speak, whilst customizable enough to brand however you like. We approached our friend Liam McKay as we thought this was just up his alley, and did he impress!

The JQuery-based featured scroller was coded from scratch by Fox, can you believe his skills! With the “Talking Points” module also uniquely coded to showcase articles perhaps gathering dust, that can be showcased on your home page by pulling through a specific tag’s results organised from most commented to least.

With 19 alternate styles designed by both myself and Cobus there should be a style that closely fits your brand. By clicking a few buttons in the theme option’s panel you can have a completely different home page in seconds, see the two example screenshots below:

Please leave a comment below with your thoughts and constructive feedback. If you like the theme you can view more information and purchase it here, or test drive it on our demo server.

We approached Liam in July and asked him to design a follow-up theme for the hugely popular Gazette Edition theme (which is also one of our all-time best-selling themes). The result is a superb, content-rich magazine- / news-style design titled The Daily Edition. Let’s have a look at the design…

The header showcasing a minimalist & sophisticated style, which just means that it's a blank canvas and ready for your modifications to be added. Just add creativity.

Simple featured scrolling module (for the homepage), which utilizes left / right navigation, as well as an indicator (the 5 red dots) of where you're at in the "slideshow".

We'll also (probably) use extensive jQuery (by the master - Foxinni) to make the video player module something special indeed.

Here's something we haven't implemented (at least in this form before)... Talking points is a mash-up of most-commented & manually highlighted articles. We obviously just love the Basecamp-esque styling of this module! This styling is also carried through & supported in the design of the sidebar elements.

Lastly, the footer "ends" the design with the same minimalism & sophistication that the header started. The footer will be extended and extremely customizable; with the main aim being to improve navigation to the most important sections on your website.

Feedback / Suggestions

So what do you think about the images we pasted above? Think this is a worthy addition to our collection of Magazine-type themes? From the teaser images we’ve posted above, is there anything (in terms of functionality) that we should consider including at this stage? Any other suggestions?

Anyway… Whatever you decide to say, just fill up & enjoy on the comments below!