Design and Prototyping for Drupal

Other Base Themes to Try

Now that I’ve given you my favorites, here are some other base themes to try, based on recommendations from friends in the Drupal community:

Square Grid (drupal.org/project/squaregrid)

Square Grid, created by PingV Creative’s Laura Scott, uses the Square Grid framework (mentioned in the chapter on using grids) as a base. This 35-column layout gives you quite a bit of flexibility in organizing your site’s blocks and columns, and like Omega, it also takes mobile-first layout into consideration.

Tao (drupal.org/project/tao)

Tao is a base theme that simply resets a lot of Drupal’s default page rendering behavior. The goal of it is to sit back and let your subtheme do its job. It does assume a focus on preprocessors (i.e., setting up things in template.php), which might mean that you have to deal with a lot of PHP and theme functions, but it also provides many advantages, such as sensible code to start working with.

Mothership (drupal.org/project/mothership)

This theme does what it can to strip out many of the extra <divs> and classes that tend to plague Drupal’s way of displaying data. This gives you the ability to start your theme with a clean slate, and creates nice, semantic markup. It even helps you get rid of the crazy extra code that Views can tend to spit out. We’ll chat about that a bit more in Chapter 13, which is all about managing the code that Views gives you.

Zen (drupal.org/project/zen)

If you spend any time in the Drupal community, frankly, you’re going ...