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By Drupal Developers Studio on
Drupal Free Themes is a free online platform that lists more than 1200 themes from drupal.org and provides a simple interface to search and sort them. All the themes are manually categorized and are available for easy filtering for the Drupal users to which we will be constantly adding features to improve the site.
Some themes on drupal.org may not have a demo readily available. In that case, you have to install a local Drupal copy and apply that theme to see how it looks. With Drupal Free Themes, it is easier now. Just click on the link "Apply Theme" in the Themes details page and you can see how the theme looks without having to install Drupal.
There are new filters that are not present in drupal.org. It is a filter that can be useful for developers. When a normal person who is looking for a theme, this might be confusing!
We simplified it by adding filters that can be easily understood by an end user searching for a theme. The themes were manually categorized according to various categories such as blog, administrative theme, business, corporate, etc. The themes have also been categorized manually for their ability to be responsive to various devices.
Why Drupal was chosen:
We knew from our knowledge and experience that Drupal is a powerful platform to build websites which offers a great flexibility when it comes to customization. We needed to handle thousands of content. Drupal gave us the power of integrating the API to fetch themes from drupal.org. Hence, Drupal was chosen!
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Drupal.org lists nearly 1,200+ Contributed Drupal themes as of December, 2016. Currently themes display page is treated the same way as the modules display page with too much information such as development status, maintenance status, issues, etc. This should be fine in a developer perspective. But non-technical folks could feel like a fish out of water while on this page! We decided to change this and come with a simple yet powerful way to display the themes.
Drupal.org Theme listing page
We noticed the most important filter is missing in the project theme page. All themes are not categorized based on the purpose they will be used for such as blog, photography, business, e-commerce, etc. So we decided to come forward and fix this little hole. We also decided to make a minimalistic theme listing page which will be easy to use for even non-developers and we decided to call it as DrupalFreeThemes.com (as FreeDrupalThemes.com is not available :P)
Removing unwanted fields and filters
- Development and Maintenance status of themes
- Sandbox projects are not listed
- Issues related to themes
- Maintainers and commit history
Adding new fields and filters
- Category field (theme type such as blogs, business, ecommerce, etc)
- Responsiveness of the theme
Redesigning theme listing page
We decided to display the themes in standard grid format so that users could browse them quickly with a filter options stick at the top.
Redesigning themes detail page
We removed the sidebar in drupal.org theme detail page such as Issues, Maintainers, developements.
The theme listing page focuses only on important details for users such as:
- Link to documentation
- Demonstration link
- Download count
- Core compatibility of the theme
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 7.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
- Views was used to list the themes in a grid view.
- Webform was used for contact form & feedback form.
- A custom module to fetch all themes from drupal.org on cron run.
Organizations involved:
Team members:
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