A Showcase of Amazing Drupal Themes
- By Sufyan bin Uzayr
- Posted in DESIGN, Tools
- 11 comments
Since its inception, Drupal has had the (rather infamous) reputation of being the developer’s CMS. Designing a website using Drupal meant hard-coding every aspect of the appearance of your website. However, over time, and with the advent of Drupal 7, the picture has changed. Drupal too, like WordPress, now boasts of several new and beautiful themes (also called templates), and the number is increasing everyday (including ports of themes from WP).
In this article, we take a look at some of the best Drupal themes that are available from the web design and development community. We hope that you will find some new and useful templates in the showcase we’ve collected.
Free Themes
BlueMasters
BlueMasters comes with a large home page slider, a custom frontpage comprised of 4 block regions along with a footer containing 4 regions. It offers support for both 2- and 3-column layouts for pages, as well as multilevel drop down menus. This is a port of a WordPress theme.
Corporate Clean
Corporate Clean offers a simple and clean design in the form of 1- or 2-column layouts. The theme also comes with native support for jQuery slideshows and Breadcrumb display.
Journal Crunch
Journal Crunch for Drupal is a port of the popular Journal Crunch WordPress theme released by Smashing Magazine. The theme is ideal for magazine websites or blogs with lots of Featured images. The footer has 4 block regions.
Sky
Sky is a minimal theme that comes loaded with the added goodness of HTML5. It comes with 4 preset color schemes, as well as custom color layout options. Apart from 17 customizable regions (along with a 4-column footer), Sky also offers excellent support for mobile devices and integration with Google Fonts API.
Selecta
Just like Journal Crunch and Bluemasters, Selecta is a port of a WordPress theme. It is meant especially for video websites and blogs. Selecta has a 2-column layout, a total of 11 regions, and detailed CSS rules for features such as sidebar ads, comment forms, contact forms, etc. Plus, Selecta has a Javascript powered implementation for ‘Featured Videos’.
ImpreZZ
ImpreZZ is a port of the original theme released by Smashing Magazine. It is a 3-column theme meant for personal blogs. Though the theme has become bit dated by now, its unique layout with middle column navigation makes it quite popular even to this day.
Blacksea
Blacksea is a light-weight and flexible theme with a 100% tableless CSS layout. The theme features 8 custom user regions, 2 resizable sidebars, plus support for both fixed and fluid width and jQuery animations.
Magazeen Lite
Yet another theme ported from WordPress, Magazeen Lite is meant for magazine websites. It comes with JS Slideshow and a 2-column layout.
Premium Themes
Community (Regular License: $40)
As the name suggests, Community is a theme built for community websites. It offers 12 different color schemes and backgrounds, both fixed and fluid layouts, 2 jQuery sliders, as well as support for banner advertisements.
Wellfolio (Regular License: $35)
Wellfolio is a minimalist portfolio theme for Drupal 7. It comes loaded with 3 pre-defined skins, jQuery animations, built-in contact form and Google Maps support, etc. All in all, Wellfolio seems to be the ideal theme for showcasing your portfolio or projects.
Creative (Regular License: $50)
Creative is a theme that comes with unlimited color options and 16 flexible regions, along with both fixed and fluid layout options. The theme is cross-browser compatible and features jQuery powered animations.
Smooth (Regular License: $40)
Smooth comes with 8 different color schemes, flexible sidebars and 15 regions that can support any number of blocks. The theme supports Google Fonts API and over 6 different menu styles.
Simple (Regular License: $45)
Simple offers 16 flexible regions, 1- 2- or 3-column layouts, split sidebars and a jQuery powered home page slider. Just in case that doesn’t impress you, the theme also comes with 12 different color schemes and 23 background options (including 12 block theme colors).
Clean Design (Regular License: $45)
Clean Design is a minimal theme that offers a great deal of customization – you can pick from 17 accent colors, 11 link colors, 11 block title colors and 6 different backgrounds. Plus, you also have a jQuery-powered Featured slider on the home page.
City Magazine (Regular License: $40)
City Magazine is a theme meant for magazine websites and blogs. The theme offers a home page slider, animated menus, separate block themes (including a ‘typewriter style’ quick news block), and the ability to create sub-themes.
Corporate X (Regular License: $35)
Corporate X is a multi-purpose theme for Drupal 7. It offers over 27 jQuery effects, auto-resizing of images, 6 base color themes and enhanced SEO settings. The theme also offers two separate page layouts for creating a portfolio and automatic thumbnail generation for images.
AT Headliner (Club Membership: $65/year)
AT Headliner is a child theme of the free Adaptive Theme for Drupal 7. It is meant for magazine and news websites, and offers features such as custom front pages, Google Fonts API, color module support, home page slideshow, multi-column footer, etc.
Ukulele (Standard License: $60)
Interesting name, isn’t it? Ukulele is a theme with a unique color scheme, targeting sports blogs and websites. It has in-built e-commerce features (just in case you decide to sell souvenirs and T-shirts on your sports blog). It comes with 3 color schemes and 8 block regions.
AT Magazine (Club Membership: $65/year)
AT Magazine is another Premium Drupal 7 theme meant for news and content publishing websites. The theme comes with 5 color schemes, 32 regions, selectable textures, multi-column footer, and homepage slideshow. Just like most other themes by this provider, AT Magazine also is a child theme of Adaptive Theme for Drupal 7.
Shemisen (Standard License: $60)
Shemisen is a theme primarily meant for photographers. It comes with support for separate blog and gallery sections, advertisement blocks, social networking icons, etc. It offers 6 color schemes, enhanced SEO settings, and newsletter options.
Techtonic (Standard License: $70)
Techtonic is an HTML5 theme with a responsive and mobile-ready design. It has 12 grid based layouts, 8 resizable regions as well as 2 re-positionable sidebars. The theme also comes with menus enhanced by jQuery animations.
a href=”http://www.themeshark.com/demo/techtonic/”>Demo | More Info
Amoeba (Standard License: $70)
Amoeba comes with 8 custom regions, fixed and fluid width as well as a home page featured posts’ slideshow. The theme is light-weight and is ideal for news and content-centric websites.
Neptune (Standard License: $70)
Neptune offers almost the same set of features as Amoeba, but it is organized in the form of a grid. It is best suited for content publishing blogs or websites with a rather informal touch.
Barracuda (Standard License: $70)
Barracuda is a rather loud theme with 8 custom regions, jQuery animations, support for slideshow, CCK and Views Modules as well as a 100% tableless CSS layout. Furthermore, Barracuda is compatible with both Drupal 7.x and 6.x .
Starboard Magazine (Standard License: $70)
Starboard Magazine is meant for news and magazine websites. It has resizable sidebars (both left and right), fixed and fluid width options, 8 custom user regions as well as support for various custom modules.
That does it for this end. Now we turn things over to you. Do you run a Drupal-powered website? If so, which themes do you use? Feel free to share your thoughts with us in the comments!
(rb)
About the Author
Sufyan bin Uzayr is a freelance writer, graphic artist, programmer and photographer based in India. He writes for several print magazines as well as technology blogs, and has also authored a book named Sufism: A Brief History. His primary areas of interest include open source, mobile development, web CMS and vector art. He is also the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of an e-journal named Brave New World. You can visit his website, follow him on Twitter or friend him on Facebook and Google+.
Jin, 06 April 2012
Good review Sufyan. I find these information very useful.
By the way, add up to your list, I find this guy is worth to take a look on: http://www.themebrain.com
They are new but provide very high quality Drupal themes as well. For free right now.
They also develop a base theme for Drupal, called TB Nucleus.
Mohit Bumb, 06 April 2012
I like at magazine and smooth
Mauricio, 08 April 2012
Nothing amazing ¬¬
Marco Berrocal, 09 April 2012
Funny, I think the same thing. Whenever I see inspiration Websites, most of them are WordPress powered, and all Drupal and Joomla sites tend to look the same. Bland and all alike. I am getting a hang of making custom themes on Drupal, so my opinion may be incorrect.
Beth, 08 April 2012
“Designing a website using Drupal meant hard-coding every aspect of the appearance of your website.”
When did it mean this? In the days of Drupal 3 or something? This makes it sound like “with the advent of Drupal 7″ the Drupal world was finally introduced to portable themes for the first time with all the wonder and fear of a caveman discovering fire.
Robert Bowen, 08 April 2012
lol, funny characterization. Actually, though, that’s not what we got from the author’s statement. In fact, with the very next line that follows the one you quoted that is answered. “However, over time, and with the advent of Drupal 7, the picture has changed. ”
We take this to mean, that over time that changed, and now with the Drupal 7 even more possibilities are open to designers and developers. Sorry for the miscommunication. Had we thought it was not clear, we would have had the author clarify it better. :)
Noupe Editorial Team
Sufyan, 11 April 2012
Hello Beth,
No, I didn’t mean that Drupal 7 gave us Jedi power overnight. :)
To quote, “Since its inception, Drupal has had the (rather infamous) reputation of being the developer’s CMS. Designing a website using Drupal meant hard-coding every aspect of the appearance of your website. However, over time, and with the advent of Drupal 7, the picture has changed. ”
I wrote “Since its inception” right in the first statement, and did use the terms “over time..” in the last statement as seen above. I meant to say that Drupal initially began as something that wasn’t the first pick when it came to third-party themes. Of course, as Drupal has grown, things have changed, and Drupal 7 finally took those changes another step further.
Drupal Theme Garden, 09 May 2012
Maybe not amazing for some pepole, but I really like BlueMasters drupal theme
muhammad, 11 September 2012
very nice themes i would like to choose one of them thanks for sharing nice themes
Thanks,
web ressource, 14 October 2012
Howdy! I’m at work browsing your blog from my new iphone 4! Just wanted to say I love reading through your blog and look forward to all your posts! Keep up the fantastic work!
Ebony Stanton, 27 November 2012
I have seen many themes of Drupal which you provide here which is very helpful to all the comers of this field and can use in their site also.