Our most popular Drupal theme, Alpine, has been hovering around the 1000 sites installed mark for a few months, but it hasn't quite broken the 1000 site threshold yet. It seems as though the 1.x branch as it was has reached it's peak. One of the additional features that we were looking to add to Alpine in the future were additional block regions. We have gone ahead and added a new Tryptych block region to the theme, which actually adds 3 new block regions below the Content Bottom region, and above the Footer region. These new block regions can extend the functionality of Alpine without interfering with your current content.
We figured that these new block regions might peak some new interest and hopefully push Alpine over the 1000 site threshold. Alpine now has 11 custom block regions for you to place your content. Since this is a fairly large change to the theme, and we made some additional changes, we have gone ahead and released our first 2.x branch for any of our themes. Alpine 2.0 is now available for download on Drupal.org.
Here is a list of the available custom block regions available for 2.x:
- Header Content
- Search Box
- Left Sidebar
- Content Top
- Highlighted
- Content
- Content Bottom
- Tryptych Column 1
- Tryptych Column 2
- Tryptych Column 3
- Footer
Along with the additional block regions, we have also cleaned up some code, and minimized the size of the header image being used by converting it to a GIF instead of PNG. Overall the image still looks fine, but has lost some of it's original definition. We were looking to try and speed up load times given some issues we had in the issue queue by Alpine theme users, and figured that the slight reduction in image quality was worth it.
We messed up a little bit on the 6.x port, and forgot to include the new header.gif image that we changed from a PNG file to save on some file size. Because of that little woops, we have a 6.x-2.1 release available.
We plan on adding additional block regions down the road in the the 2.x release along with possibly adding in some new color variations instead of just green. Stay tuned to the project page on Drupal.org for the latest releases, and feel free to create an issue for features you would like to see in future releases of Alpine, or any bugs and other issues that you find.
Thanks to all the sites that have made Alpine a successful theme project for us, and we look forward to continuing to making a better theme for you as we go. Make sure to check out our other Drupal themes including our new and improved Responsive Drupal theme, Fluid Baseline Grid 2.0.