New Fusion Drupal 7 theme release

Progress towards Drupal 7 has been impressive, and with the latest (7.0-alpha3) release, it was time to create a new version of Fusion designed to take advantage of all that awesomeness.

First things first.

Here’s the latest development snapshot of Fusion for Drupal 7: http://drupal.org/node/759870

And here’s our theme upgrade guide: Converting Drupal 6 Fusion themes to Drupal 7.

The guide points out what you’ll need to do to upgrade any of your Fusion Drupal 6 themes to Drupal 7. Of course, if you’re a Fusion Drupal Themes customer you can sit back and let us do the work for you. We’ll be upgrading all our themes as soon as Drupal 7 and the new version of Fusion stabilize.

If you’re a themer or developer it’s a great time to get started on converting your themes because there are a lot of theme-related changes in Drupal 7. Admittedly the Fusion theme system probably touches on more changes than most, but even simple themes will find plenty of advances in Drupal 7 to incorporate.

If you’re creating a Fusion theme from scratch you can just use the included Fusion Starter subtheme as your starting point. Even so, I’d still recommend taking a look at the upgrade guide since it points out a lot of helpful changes that you’ll need to watch out for if you’re new to Drupal 7 theme development.

While the full list of changes touches just about everything in a theme, the most extensive changes (for Fusion or any other theme) are found in page.tpl.php. This template is the focus of a lot of new features in Drupal 7:

• the cool granular rendering approach
• splitting out the head and body markup to a separate html.tpl.php template
• the “blockification” of content and the search box
• the new main and secondary menus
• the new Help region and the removal of the closure region
• the removal of footer message
• the renaming of the sidebars
• and more!

For this new version we also took the opportunity to make Fusion both smaller and more powerful by replacing some of Fusion’s unique features with corresponding new core functionality in Drupal 7. For instance, we converted our grid_row element to Drupal 7’s new “region” template and preprocess functions, and many of our custom body classes have been replaced by their new functional equivalents in Drupal 7. We were even able to remove two advanced theme settings (IE 31 stylesheet limit fix and username “unverified”) because they’re now part of Drupal core.

If you’re a more advanced Fusion user, we’ve added the ability to create very different nested layouts without having to alter any code in the Fusion Core’s template.php file. Changes are limited to just the subtheme’s page.tpl.php and .info files. This opens a whole new universe of flexibility in layouts for Fusion-based themes.

There’s a lot more that’s changed, and there’ll be more to come as we continue to develop features in Fusion for the upcoming Drupal 7 versions of Ubercart, Skinr, and more.