A while back, we started hearing a lot of buzz about responsive Drupal themes and responsive grid layouts. At first we dove right in and found that there are a ton of different approaches to the concept, but none were as simple as we found with the Fluid Baseline Grid framework. We decided to release a Drupal 6 theme for Fluid Baseline Grid, which then led to a Drupal 7 release due to popular demand. We are please to announce a new Drupal Fluid Baseline Grid 2.0 theme today, which has many new features and fixes.
The Fluid Baseline Grid framework, out of the box, is an HTML file with some CSS and Javascript to help Normalize your styles across different devices, screen widths, and browsers. The FBG system was built with typographic standards in mind and combines principals of fluid-column layouts, baseline grids and mobile-first responsive design into a resolution independent and device agnostic framework. Essentially, it should work on any device, and render a nice layout depending on what the screen width is of that visitor.
Our intial 1.x release of Fluid Baseline Grid, FBG, was more of a proof of concept than anything else, but we had some great feedback from the Drupal community in the FBG issue queue, which led us to do a major overhaul of the default template for version 2.x. The main addition to the 2.x branch are the sidebar block regions.
Some of the new features for Fluid Baseline Grid 2.x include:
- Header & Footer block regions.
- Sidebar First (Left) & Sidebar Second (Right) block regions.
- Additional Tryptych Column block regions.
- Overall 18 custom block regions total now!
- Updated Respond.js library.
- Updated Jquery UI library.
- Some code cleanup.
The full list of Fluid Baseline Grid block regions as of 7.x-2.0 are:
- Header
- Highlighted
- Branding
- Tryptych Top Column 1
- Tryptych Top Column 2
- Tryptych Top Column 3
- Highlighted 2
- Branding 2
- Content Top
- Content
- Content Bottom
- Sidebar First (Left Sidebar)
- Sidebar Second (Right Sidebar)
- Tryptych Bottom Column 1
- Tryptych Bottom Column 2
- Tryptych Bottom Column 3
- Footer
- Footer Message
We feel that this update should solidify FBG as a goto responsive theme as it is easy to customize with your own CSS, and page templates. You could even follow the simple example on our Project page to create your own Fluid Baseline Grid Drupal theme that is totally custom. The possibilities are endlesss!
Just an FYI, we have yet to back-port the changes we made to the 7.x version, so stay tuned for a 6.x release soon!
We look forward to more new suggestions and hopefully less issues in the 2.x branch. Let us know if you have any specific requests or need paid support for FBG. Enjoy!
*Update 8/2/12 - It felt naked without Main Menu support, so we have released a new update, Fluid Baseline Grid 7.x-2.1, that adds Main Menu support and Custom Inline Menu support to the Header and Footer block regions.