Drupal themes

08.03.2014

Author:

tibezh

Each site has its own design. Good-looking design will help attract users, they will stay on the portal longer and most likely will visit it again.

There are lots of Drupal themes that will help you to develop your own theme from scratch, to create a simple and beautiful catalogue website, or to make a useful site that will have a lot of helpful materials.

The general situation with themes for Drupal 7 resembles the situation with modules - the majority of them are still either in development process or these are just alpha or beta versions. Thus there is a lack of final releases.

Themes for Drupal 7 can be divided into 3 types:

Themes for development from scratch (basic themes).
Themes for rapid development (i.e. some minor steps to obtain the desired result will be needed).
Themes that are just attractive themselves and can be used on any website.

Let’s look at these themes in more details:

Themes to develop from scratch (basic theme)

Zen

Nowadays this is the most popular Drupal theme, powerful and simple at the same time. Here you will find the elements of HTML5 and even of adaptive theming. It is worth mentioning that this theme has good documentation and files with the detailed comments to have all the needed information at hand. By the way Zen supports Sass as well.

AdaptiveTheme

Do you need to make an adaptive design? Use AdaptiveTheme and you will never make a mistake. This theme is designed specifically for developing sites with adaptive theming. In addition you will get a convenient layout system and HTML5 support.

Fusion

Fusion is a powerful tool for any theme development. Its peculiarity lies in the fact that you can manage the layouts through comfortable user interface. Fusion is the basis of many other themes that can be also downloaded on drupal.org.

Omega

Omega is a very interesting theme. The majority of new Web technologies is introduced here in the first place, is constantly updated and has many useful integrations such as integration with Drush and with Panels module. Please note that now only two versions of Omega (the 3rd and the 4th) are supported. The third version has a convenient user interface for work with layouts. The fourth version can’t brag about its presence but it has a lot of other interesting additions.

Themes for fast development

Business

If you need just a simple design but at the same time a possibility to experiment with links, menus and blocks colors is attractive to you than Business is your choice. This theme is at the final release already and that means that you do not need to install other basic themes or special modules. Note that Drupal has a Color module in its core. So by activating this module you will be able to choose colors to almost all website’s elements on the settings page.

Corolla

This is an attractive theme that has many options which allow to customize your website design.

MAYO

It is probably the simplest theme that one could have ever invented. However inside it has a huge amount of settings.

Zero Point

It is a theme that will fit to any type of the website. Its settings contain 8 color styles options and multiple icons. Moreover, as its developers states, the theme is optimized for search engines which is a very important feature nowadays.

Ready-made Drupal themes

Rubik

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By default Seven theme is used for administrative pages. Rubik is an analogue which provides us with an attractive admin interface and high-quality icons. After all, a beautiful admin page is one of the steps to a comprehensive site management.

Professional Theme

Do you need a beautiful theme for a serious design? Take a look at the Professional Theme then. Here you will see the slideshow and a nice interface that is just perfect for corporate websites. Besides, it also contains an adaptive theming which means that your site will look nice both on the large displays and on tablets or mobile phones.

Andromeda

This is a nice theme with the original design. It has a sufficient number of regions, beautiful menus, slideshows and many more. Please note, the theme is still in development process but the available release has all the functionality and you can use it.

SimpleCorp

At first glance, the design of this theme seems usual, but it is not so. SimpleCorp has everything for the original site, e.g. a slideshow, nice fonts, ready color solutions, etc. Adaptive design is provided as well.

In this blog we have identified three types of themes and have surveyed four most popular examples of each type. Of course, there are many other samples which you may use. If you want to share more useful information with members of Drupal-community - feel free to leave your comments below!

And remember, the design of the site has a great impact on the site’s traffic. Therefore it should be unique, usable and understandable.

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