Base Themes

Continuing on from yesterday's post on my Theming Philosophy of building themes that are budget-appropriate, accessible and responsive, let's jump into base themes.

Yesterday Megan confessed, "I often suspect that there must be something big that I'm missing with base themes. I've just felt a lot better about my process since I stopped trying to use them."

Base themes are merely a set of defaults for your own theme. You can even create your own base theme with your favourite preset or default values. I like to think of them as a cheater kit. When using a base theme you'll want to find one that has the same approach to you in terms of organizing files, overwriting markup, etc. If you feel like you're fighting with the base theme, you've got the wrong one.

I use the following base themes for specific reasons:

• Zen has amazing documentation. This was the first base theme I worked with and still find its documentation useful.
• NineSixty is my go-to theme for quickly banging out just about any theme. The documentation is decent, but Zen does a better job of explaining the ins-and-outs of using base themes in Drupal.
• Fusion is my go-to theme when I will be handing off the site to someone else to maintain who is tech savvy and may need to update the layout later on. They have a great combination of default regions and the tight integration with Skinr is perfect for a number of clients I've worked with (I also use Panels for this same reason).

At some point each of those base themes will be responsive as well; however, if your time line needs a responsive theme NOW, check out Omega and Adaptivetheme. Laura also pointed out the following wiki page: What is the best starter theme for responsive web design in Drupal?

I would be remiss if I didn't point out morten's base theme Mothership which is perfect for markup fetishists. But there are LOADS more than just these six base themes. A mostly complete list of all base themes is available from Starter Themes and you can test out a few of the more popular ones at Drupal Starter Themes. In reality though any theme can be used as a base theme! For example: right now I'm working on some documentation on manipulating forms. I used Bartik as my base theme so that I wouldn't have to hack core to implement my changes.

So how did I pick my top three base themes? To be honest: initially it was in part because of the people working on the projects. JohnAlbin, Todd Ross and the TNT team are all excellent people. I tend to be interested in the projects my friends are working on. (That doesn't mean I don't like the makers of other base themes!!) The base themes are also different enough that they are each worthy of learning inside-and-out as separate tools in my Drupal toolkit. Think of it as different kinds of pliers in your toolbox...you might be able to get away with a needle nose plier when you're ... actually I shouldn't try using tool analogies as I have no idea when you'd use a needle nose plier vs. flat nose pliers and had to look it up on Wikipedia. Hopefully you sort of understand what I mean though...

If you'd like to hear more about my Drupal toolkit from my Acquia webinar PSD to Drupal Theme you can watch it here. You can also read an article that I wrote about converting your PSD to Drupal theme for Drupal Watchdog.