- Part 1: Bartik Explained
- Theme Settings
- Part 2: Enabling Themes Explained
- Part 3: Installing Themes Explained
- Installing the Danland Theme
- Installing the Zero Point Theme
- Installing the Company Theme
- Installing the Sky Theme
- Part 3: Finding Themes Explained
- Avoiding Starter themes, Theme frameworks, Base themes
- Evaluating Themes
- Commercial Themes
- Artisteer
- A Final Note on How Themes Get Built
- Practice
- What?s Next?
From the Rough Cut
From the Rough Cut
From the Rough Cut
Avoiding Starter themes, Theme frameworks, Base themes
On the themes page you can see that Zen is the most commonly installed Drupal theme. This is a good time to introduce a note of caution: unlike with modules, not all of the most popular themes are suitable for beginners.
For example, Zen is a wonderful theme with many advanced features, but it is not easy for beginners to use. The same is true of any theme whose description includes phrases like this: “starting theme”, “starter theme”, “theme framework” or “base theme”.
Some of these themes can be used by beginners together with a “sub-theme”. We saw a good example of that earlier in the chapter with AdaptiveTheme, which is labeled as “theme framework” and Sky, which is labeled as a “sub-theme”.
Generally, it will be quickly obvious if you’ve installed one of these more complicated themes by mistake. For example, Figure 9.29 shows what happens if you make AdaptiveTheme into your site’s default theme.
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Figure 9.29 Your site with AdaptiveTheme as the default theme
As become more experienced with Drupal, we do recommend that you consider exploring starter themes, theme frameworks and base themes. However, we also recommend that you walk before you can run and avoid using those themes as you start learning Drupal.