Professional Theme

Professional Theme was the corporate counterpart to Business, and the release where I stopped bolting responsive behaviour onto a fixed grid and started designing for it. It supports one-, two- and three-column layouts across twelve block regions, and it swapped the fixed-size jQuery slideshows the earlier themes shipped with for FlexSlider, which actually reflows instead of scaling a fixed canvas.

It is also the only theme in this set where I went after accessibility on purpose rather than by accident. The project page claims WCAG level 1 and 2 compliance, and in practice that meant heading order that survives a screen reader reading the page out of visual context, form elements with real labels rather than placeholder text doing double duty, and contrast ratios chosen by measurement instead of by eye. Two of those three are still things I have to argue for on every product I ship.

Nine releases went out across two branches in fifteen months: a 7.x-1.x line, then a 7.x-2.x rewrite. The second branch existed because the first had accumulated enough compromises that patching it cost more than replacing it — every fix had to be reconciled against the layout decisions of the version before. That is a lesson about versioning I have used ever since. A major version is what you ship when the shape of the thing is wrong, not when the feature list gets long enough to seem impressive.

A Drupal 8 branch was started and never finished; the project page is candid that its dev release is largely blank. Leaving that visible is more useful to anyone evaluating the theme than quietly deleting it would have been.