2008, the year of Drupal themes

By Gábor Hojtsy, 14 May, 2008

Looks like people are finally realizing the enormous business opportunities lying in doing themes for Drupal sites. There is the http://www.topnotchthemes.com/ team building truly nice themes with support for common modules, knowing Drupals ins and outs.

At the same time http://www.templatemonster.com/ is picking up Drupal in their CMS section, selling Drupal themes for all kinds of focus areas. Although some of their demos have the "Mambo license" menu item running, which is quite frankly not a testament to their understanding of Drupal. However, starting off from a ported theme could still be nice, those buying Drupal themes might not want to fiddle as much customizing the theme further (update: and there are possibly other problems my soft blogging style did not uncover here, see: http://www.drupal4hu.com/node/146 and http://www.drupal4hu.com/node/141 for notes).

If you'd be interested in ported themes though, you might want to just start off from a theme downloaded for free. There is a new site coming up, started by a Hungarian Drupal enthusiast Ádám Boros. He is going through some of the exciting existing HTML templates and converting them to Drupal themes, providing for you to download for free. Why another theme site, you might ask? Why not just submit to Drupal.org? Well, although free to use and take, some of the HTML templates are not released under the GPL, so they are not suitable for submission on drupal.org. This requires people to either host them on their own site, or go centralize to a location. Ádám's new site, drupal6themes.com aims to not only host Ádám's work but also provide a platform for others to submit their Drupal 6 compatible themes and host them there.

I am extremely happy to see all these theming businesses and the expansion of the available themes to come together, and hope the growth is going to be even bigger going forward.

Tags
Drupal
Drupal 6
themes

It's nice to see members of the core team giving support to sites outside of Drupal.org. There's lots of real innovation occurring out there, and it's great to see folks getting recognition.

It's awesome that drupal is getting augmented with a ton of commercially supported themes, but it's also important that Drupal keeps its integrity as a GPL project.
I applaud drupal theme shops but they do have to play by the rules, and share their template programming code :) (As I will do with my upcoming ass-kicking paid drupal themes on alldrupalthemes.com).

Yeah its good to see people are really doing the themes now for Drupal. i was using wordpress from past few months for few of my blogs. Now am looking for an alternative, i think i will go for drupal now that there are lots of themes to use.

I am goin to setup a site on Drupal CMS in my local network. I guess it will be a small library site. I have already found some modules for my resource. Now I am looking for an appropriate theme for free. The Underground theme on drupal6themes.com especially speaks to me. alldrupalthemes.com (in last comment) also will be helpful in my work. Thanks guys! It will be my first project on great Drupal )

we could see that CM systems are taking the lead in web design and website maintenance and all big companies are afraid of it. If we will check Google trends we could see that Drupal is the leader of CM systems nowadays. We all should stick to drupal and its themes.

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