Dries Buytaert

Today, I'd like to share designs we've created for a "responsive layout builder" for Drupal that we hope to include as part of the Spark distribution. I'm very excited about this because it brings mobile and responsive web design to the masses.

We've worked on this "responsive layout builder" concept for many weeks, and I believe the result is groundbreaking. While other layout building approaches hand-wave responsive design and produce messy markup, our approach promises to be simple to use, produce clean and semantic markup. At the same time educating the user on the logic of responsive design. Once implemented I think that this is something that could really push Drupal to the forefront of the competition.

What better than to show you what we have come up with? The following 8-minute video walks through the designs, and also provides a bit of background on the Spark project:

Special credit goes to Kevin O'Leary from Acquia for being the driving force behind this work.

Technically, this is intended to layer on top of the Panels module, for better forwards-compatibility with Drupal 8. We hope to integrate this work with the research and prototyping actively being done for the Drupal 8 Blocks and Layouts initiative.

Acquia is actively seeking implementation partners for this and other important work. If interested, please contact Angela Byron. We'd love to work with others on this.

You may remember that two weeks ago, I shared a video of an in-line editing prototype that we'd like to add to the Spark distribuion in addition to this responsive layout building tool. Its implementation is well underway in the Edit module.

As you can see, things are starting to move along quite nicely. Please join the discussion in the Spark issue queue if any of the above functionality sounds exciting to you and you'd like to help!