Today Sooperthemes announces we have open-sourced our best-selling premium theme, formerly known as Glazed Theme. As part of our total rebranding, it is released as DXPR Theme.
At the same time, we are excited to announce that our layout builder module has a release candidate available for testing. Across our product line, we are publishing “1.0.0-RC1” release candidates.
Why are we releasing our 2nd most important product for free?
Even though our business depends on selling services to support our commercial Drupal products, we are still part of the open-source community. When we feel we can open source a product for free without harming our bottom line, we will!
The Drupal ecosystem has evolved a lot over the past few years. Today most “premium Drupal themes” shops have gone out of business. This is because the lower end of the market for Drupal websites has gone practically extinct. Our theme is still popular because it takes a “Framework” approach and it is customizable enough for large Drupal projects to make use of its no-code theming capabilities, without compromising the branding and uniqueness of the end-product.
In the past 4-5 years 90% of our R&D budget has gone to developing Glazed Builder, our commercial layout builder product. Glazed Builder is now our most important product, and by pioneering a visual, easy-to-use page builder for Drupal we have contributed to making the Drupal experience better for thousands of authors and marketers.
We feel that designing and refining tools for marketers is our mission and therefore, our low-code framework theme is not our bottom line anymore and will be open-sourced and released on drupal.org. This does not mean we will abandon the theme. To the contrary, it remains an important product we will maintain it just as actively.
DXPR Builder: Now ready for testing. Go-live: next week
First and foremost, apologies for the delays. We initially planned to launch our big product and website update in March. The delays will be worth it because we have taken our time to develop and refine one of the most requested features: Composer compatibility.
We are releasing just in time to be able to fully support semantic versioning, which is now a stable feature on Drupal.org projects. Additionally, we have built our own version of “packagist” on packages.dxpr.com, which allows us to provision DXPR Builder updates via composer. As of today, the composer workflow is also ready for testing.
We feel confident that our RC1 is stable enough that we can publish a stable package for Drupal 7, 8, and 9 next week. In the RC1 we also include a migration tool to make sure your old “Glazed Builder” content will work with DXPR Builder. Our support desk is ready to assist you with migration and we have release migration documentation today.
At present our RC1 DXPR Builder works with Drupal 7 and 8. Not yet with Drupal 9, we will fix that in our 1.0.0 release.
Test drive our new products
Clients can now download our RC1 DXPR Builder module from the downloads page at sooperthemes.com
Our open source DXPR Theme is out on Drupal.org: https://www.drupal.org/project/dxpr_theme
Provide test feedback: https://www.sooperthemes.com/test-feedback-dxpr-rc1
Glazed > DXPR Migration documentation