Mark Royko + Associates

Drupal Garland: High Five!

One of the common knocks on Drupal–in my opinion a valid one–is that out-of-box it's ugly.  That's because a basic installation defaults to "Garland,"  a theme that somehow manages to deftly combine a boxy layout, baffling lack of visual hierarchy, and bland 1996 blue color palette into a single theme that almost works, but never really quite makes it.

While there's work happening right now to replace Garland as Drupal's default theme, if you were really in a bind you could always install one of the other pre-made themes available on Drupal.org. 

But still. Unless you're really in a time crunch, or just don't care, the question I always have when I browse the theme project pages is, why bother?

Like it's competitors Wordpress and Joomla, Drupal offers alternative themes that can provide instant design upgrades over Garland. You can check these out at http://drupal.org/project/Themes.

So what's there? On the theme project pages are two types of themes: Frameworks and Canned Themes. Frameworks provide a basis for building your own theme using various CSS and template pre-processing techniques. (Zen is a great example, and incidentally, is a staggering work of mindbending genius. More about that in another post.) Others are good, too, though. I've used Genesis before and am just starting to play around with Starker.

While there can be significant differences between the various frameworks, ultimately they all are pretty good, and deciding which one to use is probably just a matter of personal preference. Unfortunately, frameworks won't help you if you're looking for that instant design fix, which brings us to all the themes on Drupal.org: Canned Themes.

Browsing through these various contributions leaves me cold. Not because many of them are really bad – there are a few that are actually kind of OK.  But even if you come across a nice canned theme and install it on a site of your own, why would anyone want their site to look just like someone else's? 

4 Of July Theme: Why Do They Hate America?

This is Drupal. Its whole attractiveness as a CMS is that it can be customized to do almost anything. Customization is the whole point. So So why wouldn't you extend the same logic to the presentation layer and customize that, too. Why not just plug in Zen and build something unique on your own?

To be fair, I guess there are times when a developer needs to install a website in a hurry and just needs to install *something*, anything but Garland. There could also be a time when maybe a client wants a Drupal installation and doesn't have a design budget. (Maybe it's time to get better clients.)

But for the most part, when it comes to canned themes, I really wonder: why bother?