Do you know any free alternatives for the Omega Kickstart and Drupal Commerce Kickstart theme?
I downloaded Drupal Commerce Kickstart. It comes with its own theme based on Omega Kickstart, which itself is based on the Omega theme.
Unfortunately, this is a rather heavy theme and the multiple inheritances make it a pain to subtheme and customize that subtheme my own needs.
My goal is to build a fully custom layout based on an existing theme that's as lightweight as possible without loosing to much of the standard theme's features.
Can anyone recommend any free Drupal themes that are fully compatible with Drupal Commerce Kickstart and preferably rather lightweight? I'm struggling to find any at all. Even the ones I downloaded from this website broke when I installed them.
----
Of key importance is that they work out of the box with Drupal Commerce Kickstart and that they are free. Them being lightweight and not inheriting from other themes would be nice-to-haves.
Comments
We're just finishing a
We're just finishing a Kickstart site using Bootstrap (https://drupal.org/project/bootstrap). It did lots out of the box. Does involve inheritance and isn't really lightweight, but it has been a pleasure to work with.
We've probably added around 1500 lines of LESS to a fully customised theme.
Web shop?
Did you use it to build a web shop? Did you use Drupal Commerce?
Sorry for the late reply -
Sorry for the late reply - didn't see your question.
Yes it's a Commerce site, and yes it's Kickstart based.
Resources
Any links or code you can share?
I'm not sure how useful the
I'm not sure how useful the code would be to anyone else but I'd be happy to share it if you'd like it.
The site is at https://www.harbourcoop.co.nz/
Do you still mind sharing the code?
I am highly interested in looking at your code, as I could not figure out what is necessary to make the Bootstrap Theme work with the Commerce Kickstart installation. Would you still share your code? Don't worry, I am not going to copy it or anything, I just want to inspect the layout and what changes you made to the layouts and templates. Thanks in advance!
Bootstrap and Commerce
I agree with Andy that I don't see the benefit of sharing code of a finished site with a specific purpose.
For me the thing that makes frameworks like Bootstrap useful is the responsiveness. To keep that I'vee found means working Drupal into the theme, rather than trying to make a Bootstrap theme become a Drupal theme.
One thing I strongly recommend with such frameworks, is use the custom page or node template feature, to allow Drupal to be wrapped in the Bootstrap framework. Otherwise you can end up with what I've seen fomr others, a mix of both without the benefits of either.
I have found this does mean becoming familiar (or using a developer) with certain Drupal API functions that allow the easy getting of Drupal content and data. Or integrating Views (although this then overrides a portion of the Bootstrap framework, unless you add Bootstrap classes to the View).
On reflection the harbourcoop
On reflection the harbourcoop.co.nz site isn't a good place to start looking - partly because it started life as on Omega theme built with plain CSS and was morphed into Bootstrap & LESS instead of being rebuilt.
We've recently launched pamkerrdesigns.com with a bootstrap theme. Again there isn't actually anything in there that would move you forward on any given site - unless you wanted to look exactly the same.
We modified some templates - really nothing that we wouldn't do for most standard Drupal sites.
The templates we used/changed are :
A quick glance through them didn't show me anything that would be generally applicable to another design. If you would like to see it anyway I can ask Pam if she's happy for us to pass the theme on to you, but without some of the content & structures generated by the database & modules used it probably won't give you anything to play with.
I know this all sounds a bit useless. If you can give me a specific idea of where you're having trouble getting a bootstrap theme to work I'm happy to help if I can. We're using bootstrap on the two commerce sites we have in production at the moment so we may have more general information to share after we've done them, but they're also very different markets from the two above so we may not...
One of the things we do is
One of the things we do is shift as much layout as we possibly can into CSS and modify the templates as little as possible. Some containers and the occasional 'col-sm-3' sneaks into the markup, but 99.9% of it is in the CSS as .make-sm-column(3) . That's largely just because it suits our workflows.
Css / Custom templates
That's interesting because I've been doing quite the opposite. I find Drupal's custom template feature offers far more control over layout, especially when working with Bootstrap, etc (I use Foundation). And for me this means (because I'm building up the template manually), that it doesn't matter if it is Drupal or Commerce, it's just means knowing the field names. But I can see the benefits to your approach also..
I think the difficultly here
I think the difficultly here is why such a product would be free.
Free themes are not going to be lightweight (in general) because they are designed to have as wide-range of use as possible (the only incentive to making it for free is lots of users).
Also, I tend to find less theme makers make free good e-commerce themes, probably due to the fact that the use of these is likely to be commercial (which is understandable as commercial use tends to them not get shared further).
Personally, if it is a commercial project, I would either start with one of the common ones and do your own fine-tuning to the theme to personalize it and reduce overhead (this is how I approached it) or start from scratch.
Also, given how Commerce is integrated into Drupal anyway, I don't think it is that difficult to use any theme with Commerce, with a bit of tweaking.
Motivation
@mikeaja :
As a theme builder, it makes sense to sell your themes rather than give them away... especially for a solution that's typically used only for commercial projects. The irony, however, is that the lack of any free basic themes prevents many potential theme builders like myself from actually building any themes. Drupal Commerce should have an simple, lightweight, easy to modify, well documented "boilerplate" to start from that allows theme builders to get the hang of it in no time and build better themes faster.
You see, I'm an Open Source developer myself. I created my own CSS framework ( http://www.cascade-framework.com/ ) and have been considering creating totally free responsive Drupal themes based on my framework.
Why would I do that? I would do that because more people would use my framework if there are Drupal themes or Wordpress themes based on the framework. Also, user-friendly configurable themes would make it easier to illustrate why my framework is better than Bootstrap, Foundation and other alternatives.
Right now, however, the goal is to fully customize the layout of a Drupal Commerce eshop in as little time as possible with as little cost as possible. What I'm looking for, is some sort of "boilerplate" theme that supports Drupal Commerce specific content and that's relatively easy to subtheme or modify. Ideally, I'd like to integrate it with my CSS framework. I know that I could purchase a theme to start from, but that sounds rather crazy to me if the goal is to create my own custom design.
Omega Kickstart and Commerce Kickstart are too complex and bloated for this purpose. I haven't been able to find any suitable alternatives so far. And if I can't find any better option, I feel like I have no other option but go with Prestashop, OpenCart, WooCommerce (for Wordpress) or another eCommerce solution that actually allows me to change its themes without giving me a head ache all the time.