Building a Programmers Blog: Theming

If you're like most developers, you're pretty fussy about the way that things look, but you're probably not the hottest designer around. Fortunately, there are plenty of themes available for Drupal that give you a great look and feel with just a little work.

In this post I'll show you several of the available Drupal themes - ones that I've tried out and found to be worthwhile.

Installing Themes

Once you have downloaded a theme, installation into your Drupal site is simply a matter of copying the entire folder into place. However, like module installation the obvious location isn't the best place.

At the top level of your folder structure is a themes folder, used for the themes that come with Drupal out of the box. If you put your downloaded themes into this folder, you'll have problems when you come to upgrade to the next security release of Drupal.

Instead, copy each theme into the sites\all\themes folder - this folder doesn't get replaced with each Drupal upgrade.

Once the theme has been copied into place, go to Administer, Site Building, Themes to turn on the theme.

Garland

Garland is the default theme that comes along with Drupal. For this reason, many Drupal users want to change away from the theme as quickly as possible.

However, Garland is actually a good looking theme that can work very well for your site. Of particular interest, Garland supports the Color module, which allows you to change the colour of the theme to suit your needs.

Garland has a triple column design - two columns of blocks flanking a central column where specific content is shown.

Acquia Slate

Acquia Slate is a dark theme sponsored by Acquia. While officially intended for corporate sites, it can also work well for a blog.

Note that this is a derivative of the popular Fusion base theme which also needs to be installed at the same time.

With version 3.x of this theme, in beta at the time of writing, you can choose a two column layout, with a single sidebar showing before or after your content, or a three column layout with your content in the first, second or third column. This flexibility is inherited from the underlying Fusion base theme and provides enormous flexibility.

Acquia Marina

Much lighter and more colourful in tone, Acquia Marina is another theme sponsored by Acquia.

Again, this theme is a derivative of the Fusion base theme which must be installed at the same time. In a similar way to Slate, version 3.x of this theme provides greatly enhanced flexibility with your block placement.

Zero Point

Not all the good themes come from Acquia of course - ZeroPoint is a great lightweight theme that combines a great look with flexibility and versatility. ZeroPoint comes with a number of colour variations, choices between fluid and fixed width, and options for block region sizing.

Of course, this is just a small sampling of available themes - if you browse through themes on Drupal.Org you'll find a heap of free themes, many of very high quality. And, if you have any budget at all, you can find more themes available commercially.