Theme and modules on Drupal.org
Drupal.org naturally runs on Drupal. The theme for Drupal.org is called Bluebeach. You will notice that it is not available on the theme's download page. Visual identity brand is very important and to see from various past forum requests, many people believe that the current theme is striking. In order to preserve that 'brand' identity, Bluebeach will not be made available. There are several long threads in the forums that cover this discussion in more depth.
If you are looking for a similar theme, check out Friends Electric . It was written by the same person and is a more generic theme with many of the same techniques as Bluebeach.
As every web designer knows, designing a theme that looks the same across a wide spectrum of browsers is a challenge, especially when one considers the diversity and content on this site and platforms browsed from. In several cases the decision was made sacrifice compliance for consistency across browsers.
The front page of Drupal.org is a fairly standard use of Drupal with a minor addition. The orange box is the standard mission statement (Administer >> Site configuration >> Site information). The rotating image to the left is a php script that displays a banner image from a directory. The green download box is also part of the theme template. The remaining blocks in blue are standard blocks. The grey box is a standard forum post from the news and announcements section, generally with comments disabled, Promoted to front page, and Sticky at top of lists set.
The font used for the Drupal logo is known as FF Max.
We use a variety of core and contributed modules, which has resulted in some confusion about why some features are apparently 'missing' from a default Drupal install and how you could get a similar site going.
Drupal.org uses the following modules from core:
Core - required
- Block - Controls the boxes that are displayed around the main content.
- Filter - Handles the filtering of content in preparation for display.
- Node - Allows content to be submitted to the site and displayed on pages.
- System - Handles general site configuration for administrators.
- User - Manages the user registration and login system.
- Watchdog - Logs and records system events.
Core - optional
- Aggregator - Aggregates syndicated content (RSS, RDF, and Atom feeds).
- Book - Allows users to collaboratively author a book.
- Comment - Allows users to comment on and discuss published content.
- Contact - Enables the use of both personal and site-wide contact forms.
- Drupal - Lets you register your site with a central server and improve ranking of Drupal projects by posting information on your installed modules and themes
- Forum - Enables threaded discussions about general topics.
- Legacy
- Provides legacy handlers for upgrades from older Drupal installations. - Menu - Allows administrators to customize the site navigation menu.
- Path - Allows users to rename URLs.
- Ping - Alerts other sites when your site has been updated.
- Profile - Supports configurable user profiles.
- Search - Enables site-wide keyword searching.
- Taxonomy - Enables the categorization of content.
- Required by: Forum, Image Gallery, Project releases, Simplenews
- Tracker - Enables tracking of recent posts for users.
- Depends on: Comment
- Upload - Allows users to upload and attach files to content.
Additionally, the following contributed modules run on drupal.org:
Image
- Image - Allows uploading, resizing and viewing of images.
- Required by: Image Attach,Image Gallery
- Image Gallery - Allows sorting and displaying of image galleries based on categories.
- Simplenews - Send newsletters to subscribed e-mail addresses.
- Depends on: Taxonomy
Other
- Code Filter - Provides tags for automatically escaping and formatting large pieces of code.
- Feature - Provides a custom feature set for a web site.
- HTML Corrector - Ensures all HTML in user-submitted content is valid when output on the page.
- Lists - Allows mailing lists subscriptions
- Porter Stemmer - Improve English language searching by simplifying related words to their root (conjugations, plurals, ...).
- Tracker2 - Reduces the number of slow queries induced by Tracker module.
Project
- CVS integration - Provides access to commit logs, account management, and access control for the Concurrent Versions System (CVS).
- Project - Provides a project node type and browsing of projects.
- Required by: Project issue tracking, Project releases, Project usage, Project legacy XML-RPC
- Project issue tracking - Provides issue tracking for the project.module.
- Depends on: Project
- Project releases - Provides a release node type to represent releases of projects.
- Project usage - Provides data about installed usage of projects (requires update_status.module clients connecting to this site -- most sites should NOT enable this module).
- Depends on: Project, Project releases
- Project legacy XML-RPC - Provides XML-RPC server code for legacy update_status 5.x-1.* clients
- Depends on: Project, Project releases
In addition to core and contributed modules, there are also several custom php pages (handbook) and blocks.
Note however that Drupal.org tends to follow the development version, so it may have functionality which is not yet present in the latest major release. It is a good idea to check the log of changes to see if the feature you want is only present in the development section (marked as version Drupal x.x.x, xxxx-xx-xx (development version)).