Working in Higher Ed I like to take a step back from my local Drupal development resources and search for new perspectives and ideas on how to approach tasks using Drupal.

I released these 2 projects recently:

• The Odyssey Project: A website showcasing a professor departmental project.
• Research Mentorship Program: A custom webapp for a department.

1 uses AdaptativeTheme and the other uses SkeletonTheme. For my own purposes over the weekend I looked into Stanford’s Open Framework base theme for Drupal 7. Stanford’s sites are built with campus wide used subthemes of this theme; but Open Framework is essentially branding free. The documentation and resources website with various examples can be seen at the Stanford Open Framework website.

Open Framework (OF) is based on Twitter Bootstrap (OF 2.x-beta1 uses Bootstrap 2.3.1). Any features supported by Bootstrap out-of-the-box are supported by OF, for instance these include:

• a Carousal component
• expandable and collapsible accordions
• base styles supplied by Twitter Bootstrap

Additionally OF supplies a lot of its own functionality on top of Bootstrap. The base theme is designed to make a site essentially powered by Drupal Blocks as a cookie-cutter building process developing sections of a site. In general as the site creator you have no design-power to reorganize the responsive behavior between desktop and mobile devices. This is a tradeoff of ease-of-use and customization of the theme. So OF provides:

• Mobile enabled Menu
• Flow layout regions for Drupal blocks
• pre-configured layout regions for your site gathered from researching pre-existing sites across the full campus.
• Font Awesome support
• Drop down menu support

So if you want a fairly powerful theme for layout, and don’t want to stress about how things will look on mobile devices. OF seems like a great starting point for many types of projects! Also, they have a newer 2.x beta release in the early months of 2014. This project is not dead.

Beyond touring the OF website I also viewed a couple of archived drupal sessions showcasing OF. The following youtube video covers many aspects of using OF in conjunction with the following drupal modules: context, views, block classes.

Additionally the Youtube video also shows a small example of creating a Views Rewrite (overwriting the default Views output for rendered content) if you’ve never done this before.

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