Do You Believe in Magic?

Today I’m excited to announce Magic, a first-of-its-kind module for Drupal designed to integrate advanced theme development settings into any theme. Born from a collaboration between Ian Carrico (ChinggizKhan), Sebastian Siemssen (fubhy), and myself, Magic aims to standardize much of the repeated features between various base themes, especially with Sebastian’s Omega 4 and Ian and my Aurora base themes, and make those features easy to implement for any theme.

Taking inspiration from Aurora, Omega, Zen, and Omega Tools, Magic seamlessly integrates into the theme settings for each theme and provides a multitude of enhancements that are available on a per-theme basis. These enhancements include excluding CSS and JavaScript files individually or in bulk, enhanced CSS aggregation, backporting of Drupal 8 JavaScript handling to Drupal 7, moving of JavaScript files from the head to the footer, and development options including rebuilding of theme registry on page reload, indicators for viewport width in both px and em as well as HTML classes most commonly added by JavaScript tools like Modernizr, and a quick and easy way to export all of your theme settings to your theme’s .info file for deployment.

We are looking to add more tricks to Magic’s bag, so if there’s any great feature you’d really like to be able to use, let us know and we’ll look into it. For now though, I’m super excited about magic and I can’t wait for everyone to start playing around with it. Magic 1.1 is out now, and the first release of Aurora to take full advantage of Magic is Aurora 3.x, so either download that and start to play, or use it with any theme you’ve got now to add a little magic to it!

Good luck have fun!

A big huge awesome YOU ROCK goes out to Ian for really spearheading the build of Magic. He’s the man. Everyone say thank you. He’s @iamcarrico on Twitter. Seriously though, thank him for being awesome and rocking this out. This wouldn’t exist without him putting in the time. Also go thank Sebastian, he’s @thefubhy on Twitter. Lots of the code in Magic came from his work to beat Drupal into submission in Omega 4.