It was about a year ago that I wrote my first post on the best Drupal 7 themes. At the time, it was slim pickings coming up with a list of strong choices. Fortunately, a lot has changed since then. 

A couple quick points before we get to the themes. The criteria I used in putting this list together has changed a bit since last time. First of all, these are all free themes. Extra points were awarded if the theme uses responsive design or an installation profile, especially if it includes a WYSIWYG. These are things that I think show extra attention to user experience.

To create a variation of an existing theme, you could simply copy the desired theme's directory to sites/all/themes change the theme name in a a couple of places and start hacking away. But duplication is a waste of disk space. More importantly it creates an unnecessary maintenance overhead: if an improved version of the original theme comes out, you'll have to merge it with the changes you made in the various files of the overridden version.

Enter subthemes. Subthemes inherit all style sheets, javascript and templates (.tpl.plp files) from the theme they declare as their base. You don't have to hack into the base theme code, which means that when a new version of the base comes out, you automatically inherit all the improvements!

Websites are no longer viewed only on a desktop screens. More and more smartphones, tablets and netbooks are introduced to offer new and more convenient ways to access web content everywhere. In this article, Symphony Themes introduces two FREE Drupal 7 themes, Alphorn and Conch, which support display in various devices from smartphones, tablets to laptops and big screen computers.

In the Drupal Conference London 2011 last month, Tom Deryckere showed some figures of the mobile penetration on his session "Bridging gap between desktop and mobile publishing with Drupal": 

Facebook: 200M mobile users, 2x more active than Desktop users
Twitter mobile: 50% of total active users, 40% of all tweets.
Only 21% of Google's largest advertisers have a website that is optimized for mobile.
In fact, Morgan Stanley predicts at the current rate of change and adoption, mobile Web usage will surpass desktop Internet usage by 2015. Therefore, websites in next generation must, either adaptively or responsively, support mobile devices.

In order to show how a mobile website looks, Symphony Themes introduces two Drupal 7 themes, Alphorn and Conch, available for FREE download.

A few months ago I wrote about WordPress Security. Now, armed only with the words “free WordPress themes,” builtBackwards’ Theme Authenticity Checker Plugin and Donncha O Caoimh’s Exploit Scanner, I’m going to take a look through the first page of Google to see just how safe pages ranking for “Free WordPress Themes” are.

The Themer's Theme!
Layout Studio is a Drupal 6 development theme for anyone who wants to quickly create custom themes while maintaining standards compliant and SEO friendly code.

In some ways, Layout Studio is comparable to Zen but provides the following key advantages:

Zen uses the "left-sidebar" and "right-sidebar" for its sidebar regions. Layout Studio uses the more symantically correct "secondary" and "tertiary", since the secondary or tertiary regions could be on either side of the primary content.
More layout options. Zen can only have a right and/or left sidebar, but cannot have two sidebars to the left or the right of the main content area if your layout requires it.
More body, block and node classes classes.

Den första artikeln av tre i en serie om hur teman fungerar i WordPress 1.5.