Drupal has always attracted developers, because of the amazing and clean code it has, and because of the power of Drupal's APIs. Drupal has been slow to attract web designers, and I have a feeling that is about to change if it hasn't already. It is no secret that Wordpress and Joomla have a lot more beautiful free and premium themes avialble to download, this has always baffled me since it so much easier (in my experience) to make a Drupal theme. I guess designers are attracted to the simplicity of Wordpress and Joomla, but with big usability improvements coming to Drupal, more and more web designers are going to start to try out Drupal.

That being said there is a wealth of beautiful Drupal themes out there, as I hope you can see from my post, you just need to know where to look.

Professional themes

Ebizon Redfire

http://drupal.org/project/ebizon_redfire

This theme is a very stylish an elegant theme, the header with the block primary links, makes it look very without resorting to any background images. It's great to see good looking themes that load so quickly, about 80-90% of loading time from sites comes from the images, CSS and JavaScript. The only background image in this themes comes

AD Novus

http://drupal.org/project/ad_novus

AD Novus is a very nice looking theme, I really like the styling of the primary links as big tabs in the header. I also like the big header image, and the styling of the site name and block headers. It was originally a GPL theme for Joomla, which was ported to Drupal. It seems that a hosting company called Duplika has sponsored Avioso Design to make several Drupal themes and release them as part of an AD series. This is very interesting and I hope we see more initiatives like this.

art of the AD Themes series, generously sponsored by Duplika, whereby some of the greatest themes for other content management systems, as well as general open source templates, are ported by Avioso Designs to Drupal.

ADT Webapplication

http://drupal.org/project/adt_webapplication

ADT Webapplications is a stylish versatile Drupal theme, it can be used for many type of websites. It's a shame this theme isn't being actively maintained and that there isn't a Drupal 6 version for it. this theme has a very nice header block that let's you put content in the blue gradient bar, a site overview or a welcome message looks very nice here. Unfortunately this theme doesn't work with the Administration menu module, which is one of my favorites.

General purpose themes

Sky

http://drupal.org/project/sky

Sky is a great theme with a lot of attention paid to details. I really like the soft gradient they used for they're navigation and they're block headers. They also have nice default stylings for tables and definition lists. Another great feature about this theme is how they styled Drupal links to look like buttons at the bottom of posts. I don't think I would have used the same technique they used, but it looks very nice. As an added bonus in the new versions you can have Suckerfish drop-down menus in your primary links.

Acquia Marina

http://drupal.org/project/acquia_marina

I think this theme should definitely go into core, its really a no-brainer. TopNotch themes did a really good job on this one, and many thanks go to Acquia for sponsoring the first free premium theme from Top-notch themes. This themes has lots of template files, this is great for beginners to realize what kind of templates you can have, maybe they should add a basic template overriding the user profile template from the user module. The theme has great looking icons that come with it, so that's definitely a plus.

A great feature from this theme is all the block regions it has. This is really important, and more and more themers should adopt this. Users should be able to add blocks wherever they want in they're site without having to modify the theme. This is a great theme I recommend giving it a try.

Pixture Reloaded

http://drupal.org/project/pixture_reloaded

This theme looks very nice and best of all it uses the color module in the same way Garland does, so users can customize the color scheme of the whole theme without touching the CSS or modifying the images. I think this is something really good and maybe this theme should be considered for core. This seems to be a pretty solid theme, I really like it, but it definitely has not been as widely tested as Garland, so I thin k Garland should probably still be the default theme, until one of the new themes that is going to core is tested enough.

Pixture reloaded is a complete rewrite from the Pixture theme, which unfortunately was a table based theme (I know!). I don't know why the author of the Pixture reloaded theme didn't become a maintainer of the Pixture theme, and released a CSS version. I really don't see the advantages of having a nice theme like this in tables! Maybe the two projects should be merged to avoid confusion.

Blog themes

Dark Blue

http://drupal.org/project/darkblue

The Dark Blue theme is a great looking minimalistic theme, it has nice typography and a nice layout. I love the great big header with the site name ate the left center, it looks very stylish, even without an image. This theme also has the same system of fancy dates that was made in the clean theme, so you can disable the styled themes if you want. I We need more blog style themes, to bring more bloggers into Drupal. Wordpress is fantastic for a single user blog, because it is very easy to use. Of course you can make an amazing blog with Drupal that has features Wordpress users dream of, but straight out of the box Drupal is not great for bloggers.

mulpo

http://drupal.org/project/mulpo

We are very proud to include our very own theme in this list for top Drupal themes. Although the theme still needs some work (we are working on new features and bug fixes for the next release), is a very nice looking theme. The mulpo theme manages to look very stylish with just one background image, all the rest is done with CSS. The current release of the mulpo theme has semantic clean markup, and is very very lightweight.

Marinelli

http://drupal.org/project/marinelli

Marinelli is a great looking theme, that comes with some nice features, and a nice layout. the theme has a newspaper-style layout with one large columns for content and two thin columns as sidebars. This theme comes with a php image rotator for the banner, fin the CSS they use this php script as the source for the background image. The image rotator reads a folder and displays an image it reads from a folder in the theme, you can have as many images as you like, everytime you reload a page it will have a different background image on it.

Fervens

http://drupal.org/project/fervens

Fervens is a nice simple blog theme, originally posted in Smashing Magazine and brought to Drupal by ktleow. This theme features nifty corners and the Whatever:hover script already integrated in theme level. Although this is not my favorite style of theme, I still think it looks very nice for a blog,

Alek 2.0

http://drupal.org/project/alek_2_0

This is an amazing theme, that looks amazing on a blog. It is a shame this theme is not being more actively maintained, I found lots of bugs in the theme that are really easy to fix, and perhaps I'll submit a patch, but it doesn't look like the maintainer has the time to commit anything. The sidebars is what made me fall in love with this theme, they look amazing, it also has some nice features like icons. Maybe when I get some more free time I'll ask the maintainer if I can co-maintain it to fix some bugs and possibly have a stable release. While in vacation in Peru I quickly modified this theme for a Drupal site my brother was working on, you can see it here: http://paiperu.org/

Artistic themes

Agregado

http://drupal.org/project/agregado

The first time I saw this theme I was blown away, the demo site was so beautiful, and the one of the few clues that it was a Drupal site was the login (with most themes you can easily recognize a Drupal site). The creator of this theme has been doing great work porting the Wordpress templates from Smashing Magazine to Drupal. I remember that about a month ago I saw color paper, and said hmm maybe I'll work on porting this to Drupal when I get some free time, and was very pleased to see that the theme was available on the Drupal site.

Decayed

http://drupal.org/project/decayed

This theme makes me very excited about the themes that we will start seeing in the near future. This is a very nice theme, and although it has some things I don't like, it's one of the themes that looks the least like a Drupal theme. I think that's a good thing, Drupal has always been critisised because of it's themes, and the ironic theme is that it's easier to build a Drupal theme. Drupal's theming system is fantastic and makes a lot of sense to HTML/CSS designers, you basically have a full HTML template of a page with variable printed out in PHP where you need dynamic content. I've always been surprised the amount of beautiful Wordpress templates. Drupal has beautiful themes (as I hope people can see from this post) but nowhere near the amount of that Wordpress and Joomla have. It's time to bring more and more designer into Drupal, I will be addressing this in one of my future posts.

Color Paper

http://drupal.org/project/colorpaper

Yet another great Wordpress template ported to Drupal by ktleow. The way the dates are styled in this theme is amazing, and I also really like the textures. This theme has very nice features like a PNG fix for IE, 5 different colour schemes, and a themed maintenance mode page. The Photoshop source files for the theme are also available in the project page to download.

Administration theme

Root Candy

http://drupal.org/project/rootcandy

Rootcandy is an amazing admin theme for Drupal, I'm sure it'll help users coming from Wordpress or Joomla, become more familiar with th Drupal admin. One of the usability problems found in the usability testing the Unniversity of Minnesota did for Drupal, was that a lot of users had trouble understanding how in Drupal the administration was overlayed in the site. This theme definitely helps with this problem. Having said that, I don't really use it that much, since I'm so used to Drupal's administration, I just use the excellent admin_menu module to go where I need with one click. If you are just starting to use Drupal, or want a nice theme for administrative users then I'd definitely recommend it. Make sure you enable this theme as the administration theme in site configuration, and not as the theme for the whole site, unless that's exactly what you want.

Base themes

Clean

http://drupal.org/project/clean

The clean theme is an amazing starter theme, it's lightweight and has clean markup. The theme only has one image, but still looks very nice, this makes the page load very quickly. This theme has a very nice date theming system called fancy dates. You can enable or disable the fancy dates for your blogs in the configuration settings. There is one feature you can enable in the theme settings page that will flush the theme registry cache, making it easier to build and test your own theme on top of the clean theme, notice that this is only for the Drupal 6 version. I highly recommend this theme to anyone looking for a lightweight base theme. Psynaptic did a great job building this theme and actively maintains it.

Zen

http://drupal.org/project/zen

The Zen theme is the most complete base theme available for Drupal. It has an amazing set of features, and is one of the most actively maintained and documented Drupal themes. This theme was originally started by Jeff Robbins and then maintained with great success by John Albin, who made a complete theming system.

You can still see the Zen original as a base theme called zen_classic. Now you can build you own theme quickly as a subtheme. You get a default STARTERKIT theme which you can build on top of. Building your theme as a Zen subtheme let's you upgrade the core of the Zen theme to the latest version. This is very important because one of my frustrations with the old Zen theme was that I built the first theme for this site using an early version that had many bugs, some of which broke my site's layout in IE6. It was really troublesome to go through the changes an update the CSS from the latest version of Zen into my customized version of an earlier Zen theme. This would have been easy with John Albin's current technique.

Building a Zen subtheme is very quick once you know how and is much quicker than stripping down a theme that you like and building your own design on top of that. After using the Zen theme for most of my projects, I have now build my own base theme from scratch and I'm quite happy with it, I used to make the mulpo theme. Although Zen is a fantastic base theme, it can be a bit heavy, and because it let's CSS designers style the theme quickly, it suffers from having to many divs in the markup. Sometimes you need a very lightweight theme that has minimal markup and only the required template files.

Overall I'd say that there is so much to learn from the Zen theme, I always go over the Zen theme code for reference when I'm building my own themes. If you need a very light theme, know the Drupal theming system very well, and are comfortable building html templates then you're probable better off making your own from scratch.

Framework

http://drupal.org/project/framework

Framework is another very nice base theme, I've heard good things about, although I've never personally used it in a project. This theme has some reusable classes you can use to style your content, and it also comes with a maintenance mode template. This theme looks nice in mobile browsers, and has the admin section adapted from the Garland core theme. The styles CSS files is nicely organized and all fonts are set nicely in ems.

Related links:

• 25 beautiful Drupal themes
• A Review of Drupal 6 Starter Themes