• CMS
Vitaly Friedman May 12th, 2010

50 High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

For a fair few numbers of years Drupal has had the reputation of being a difficult CMS to learn. Any web developer will tell you that. It is a fair reputation, but this does take a lot of the gloss and prestige away from what it deserves.

Whereas once you manage to get beyond the initial tricky learning curve, everything falls into place and is relatively straight forward, and what you are left with is one powerful beast of an engine that can handle anything you throw at it. You either really love Drupal or you should learn to love Drupal. Yes, I am a Drupal fan.

Drupal Homepage

Drupal does hold its place well amongst the top three CMSes (Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal), and does have its own specialized section within web development. And contrary to belief, it is a highly versatile CMS that can be used for almost any type of website whatever the size, just as you can with almost all other CMSes.
Of course, it is all down to the personal preferences and choices of the developer, and Drupal should be considered for all projects.

In this collection, we have not only collected the best free and premium Drupal themes, we also offer a useful selection of blank or starter themes, perfect for your first steps into Drupal development.

An Introduction to Drupal

If this is your first step into Drupal, perhaps you should take a look at the basics first. In this 9 part tutorial video series they offer a concise introduction into Drupal and all of its subsequent tutorials cover all aspects of its theme development, from first installation to controlling the visual design of an operating site.

9 Part Drupal Development Video Series:

  1. Drupal 6 Introduction
  2. Downloading and Installing
  3. Initial Setup
  4. Home Page Setup
  5. Creating a Poll
  6. Drupal 6 Blocks
  7. User Setup and Profiles
  8. Drupal 6 Themes
  9. Relaunching Bitnami

Free Magazine and Newspaper Style Themes

Alphorn (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Blog Grail (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Analytic (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Conch (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

960 Robots (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Free Corporate and Business Themes

Orange (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Summertime (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Acquia Prosper (Acquia Prosper Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Chrono (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Corporate Website (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Acquia Slate

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Zero Point (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

D4rk (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Free Blog Themes for Drupal

Dessert (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

BlogBuzz (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Browny (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Gateway (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Elements Theme (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Mulpo Theme (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

id-Facta (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Alpha

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Dingus

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Fusion Theme (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Beach (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Arclite (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Mystique (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Pixel (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Internet Encyclopedia

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Nitobe

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Light (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Twittish

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Free Wordpress Ported Themes for Drupal

Magazeen

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Arthemia

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Colourise (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Color Paper (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Agregado

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

AD The Morning After (Demo)

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Blank and Starter Drupal Themes for Developers

Zen
If you are using Drupal for the first time to build your own standards-compliant theme, you will find it much easier starting with Zen.
Out of the box, Zen is clean and simple with either a one, two, or three column layout of fixed or liquid width. In addition, the HTML source order has content placed before sidebars or the navbar for increased accessibility and SEO.
This theme is backed up by fantastic online documentation and tons of code comments for both the PHP (template.php) and HTML (page.tpl.php, node.tpl.php).

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Beginning Blank Canvas
The Beginning theme is a W3C standards-compliant blank canvas theme for developers with support for one , two or even no sidebars and with up to ten editable regions.

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Framework Blank Canvas
Framework is another user friendly blank canvas theme that is set to a 24 column grid of 950px, with support for one, two or three-column layouts.

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Genesis Starter Theme
Genesis is first and foremost a base theme for building Drupal 6 sub-themes with very flexible layout options and very easy to install with its simple three step process.
This starter theme is very well documented and supported with a collection of video tutorials, which can be found here: Genesis Video Collection.

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Blueprint starter Theme
Blueprint is a starter Drupal theme built upon, as its name states, the Blueprint CSS framework. As with all starter themes it has a very flexible layout, from 1 to 3 columns, based on where you configure your blocks to show (left, center, right).

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Basic
Basic was originally a stripped down version of the ZEN theme (see above), it has now become its own concept of a theme starter and boasts a clean HTML structure with extensible CSS classes and ID's for unlimited theming possibilities as well as a top-down load order for improved SEO.
Basic's goal is to provide themers the building blocks needed to get their designs up and running quickly and simply.

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Fusion
Fusion is a powerful base theme, with layout and style configuration options built in that you can control through Drupal's UI. It's based on a simplified 960px or fluid 16-column grid.
It includes a commented "starter" subtheme for easy CSS theming and also has plenty of helper classes for even easier Drupal theming.

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Premium Drupal 6 Themes

Web Solutions
Web Solutions is a two or three column corporate site with numerous regions in the upper area of the page, so you can easily build custom landing pages with blocks to highlight certain projects, products, or features.

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

All Geared Up
All Geared Up is a very flexible theme, with a translucent drop down menu for your primary links and two different header styles that allow for a custom front page. The preface regions are collapsible, and the sidebar expands and alternates between two block styles. Postscript regions are designed to match the site and can be used in any combination.

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Platino (Demo)
Its clean and bright style, accompanied by its flexible 25 editable regions, Platino is perfectly suited for any community themed site.

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

ZincOut (Demo )
The ZincOut theme has 28 regions, a built-in jQuery menu, built-in form tooltips and completely customizable via the themes settings.

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Premium Business & Portfolio (Demo)
This professional business Drupal theme comes with a portfolio page, front page slider, and seamlessly features your content. This theme also features many Drupal customizations such as front page slider for portfolio/service items, user avatars in comments, featured front page footer blocks, and much more.

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Kontroller Drupal Dark News (Demo)
Kontroller provides clean, usable styles and defaults, is easy to customize via the CSS file and provides easy administrative configuration of the front page.

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

ThemeNews Drupal News (Demo »)
The ThemeNews Drupal News Theme is a grid based news & magazine style theme that features a sidebar that is perfect for displaying 125x125 ads. The color scheme is completely customizable via the CSS file and the theme is easy to set up and comes with step by step instructions.

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Magazine Plus (Demo)


The Magazine Plus premium theme for Drupal is a news and magazine theme with clean lines and precise image handling. This theme is a very flexible and unique magazine-style theme for blogs of any topic -- celebrity, news, business, movies, music, travel, etc. It's great for colleges and universities and can be easily adapted to fit any online publication.

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Black Portfolio (Demo)
Black Portfolio is a clean and simple folio template with jquery slider effects to show off works can be controlled by keyboard ( arrows, space bar enter ) too, this theme works for web designers, photographers etc...

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

Smart Interiors (Demo)
Smart Interiors is a simple and easy to use clean and simple elegant Drupal theme.

High Quality Themes for Drupal Developers

35 comments

  1. Great post !!!
    Thanks for write about Drupal, maybe you should include one article about new alpha Drupal 7.

    Greetings.

  2. Having created websites for Drupal over 2 years now it’s safe to say there’s not a whole lot of beautiful and professional themes out there, comparing to WordPress or Joomla (I think many of the listed themes here are not ‘quality’). Of course for a dev/designer it doesn’t really matter because all you need is the Zen theme. But this does turn a lof of newbies away.

  3. finally, a site that targeted Drupal. My class has been looking for great module development and theming tutorials for weeks now. Thanks a lot Noupe!

  4. I prefer Adaptivetheme, http://drupal.org/project/adaptivetheme, because it is focussed on accessibility and standards. Adaptivetheme for Drupal 7 is now HTML5 ! Many layout and design options can be done through point-and-click in theme settings. Adaptivetheme has many cool subthemes developed for it, one of them is the Mobile theme.

    I find it easy to develop from “scratch” with Adaptivetheme. The biggest strength of AT is that it is easy to port your existing HTML / CSS to AT. If you have already a site, it is easy to map your design, HTML and CSS to AT, and port it with little change.

  5. The Magazine Plus premium theme for Drupal is a news and magazine theme with clean lines and precise image handling. This theme is a very flexible and unique magazine-style theme for blogs of any topic i have ti!

  6. Thanks for the article. Any more review or comment on forDrupal’s Platino Drupal Theme?

    Anyone using it ?
    Or do anyone know if there is any other cms (e.g. WordPress) got similar community theme ?

    Cheers~

  7. I prefer Adaptivetheme for a starter theme, its responsive and supports mobile and is very easy to get started with. I find the markup (HTML5) and CSS easy to work with and getting my designs ported over is strait forward.

    I have worked with a bunch of the others, maybe Zen would be the only other one I would seriously consider – its a great theme but I prefer Adaptivetheme as it takes care of the responsive heavy lifting.

    BTW it would be good to see an article on the top responsive themes (styled themes not so much starter themes), as this is something I think a lot of people want now – themes that work in mobile just as well as they do in your desktop or lappy.

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