I've spent a good bit of time again on the Omega theme in preparation for my presentation at DrupalCamp Montreal, and getting closer to a much more stable release of the theme.
After taking a bit of a break from coding on the Omega theme, I was able to quickly locate some things that I didn't like the setup on, and figure out better ways to implement the same functionality. This also came from a couple of personal projects (nothing launched yet) that I was using the Omega theme for, and in both cases, learned a lot in how I needed the base theme to be more flexible to minimize coding needed to implement a variety of layouts.
The presentation I'm working on is mostly complete, and starts with a quick introduction to the 960gs concepts. I didn't want to spend too much time here as I'm hoping everyone has a decent understanding of the basics already, or if not that my quick overview would be enough to draw someone in, but still leave as much time as possible for the Omega concepts and a demo of the theme in action.
Over the weekend I did release the first alpha release of the Omega theme, getting it out of DEV status, and after some cleanup on the code, I really think it's mostly ready for production use. Some of the file structure and functionality might stil be a bit confusing to new themers, but experienced themers should be able to hit the ground running and put together some prototypes very quickly. There were a few things that changed over the weekend that need some cleanup still, including the region defaults that are present in the base theme, but not the current staterkit theme, so upon first setup of the staterkit, all the settings need to be configured to work appropriately for the first time. I'm hoping to have this fixed quickly, hopefully today, and also will be commiting some other changes that are new CSS code for the 960gs that @nathansmith put together and included to the 960gs download last night.
Nathan just implemented a 24 column grid where the grid columns are 30px wide, and have 5px margins rather than the default 10px margins in the 12 and 16 column versions. This is a little more like the blueprint grid CSS, and should give excitement to some of the people who talk down on 960. Essentially, the concepts are all the same, and all the same features of 960gs apply, but the margins are less, so the gutters beteween columns in the 24 column interface are 10px total instead of 20px.
So with this new 960gs option, I needed to quickly implement it into the Omega theme to keep up with the times, and it was suprisingly easy, which let's me know the Omega code is good, and flexible for future grid sizes, and custom grids as well for people that want the features of Omega & 960 with their own unique grid sizing. I even tracked down a minor bug in the preprocess_page() functionality of the base theme because of implementing the 24 column layout, and was able to track that down and correct it quickly.
I hope to have everything wrapped up with the presentation slides tonight, and be able to send those over to @nathansmith for a quick glance prior to giving the presentation this Saturday in Montreal. The slides will be available here at the time of the presentation, and video of the presentation will be added once those videos have been published after the event.
Stay tuned for more information on the Omega theme and upcoming changes soon!
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