Review of Artisteer software for automatically generating Drupal themes

Wow-- this could be a boon for those of us drupalers that don't have an artistic bone in their body! Yes it generates a bland cookie cutter style, but for me it looks worth it for the graphic / css elements alone-- i can jazz it up with different regions and tpl files and extend it for other modules myself.

I'm downloading it now-- i'll post back after i take it for a spin.

EDIT: i just took it for a test drive - O...M...G! This thing is amazing for the graphically challenged. To me the fact that it can generate a drupal theme is the least of it's capabilities. I'm used to turning oswd designs into themes. It's nice that it can save me some time doing that, but it's the fact that I can easily play with things like tabs, buttons, block designs, even drop down menu styles, as easily as i can edit a word document that's the TRUE value. If i had to try and do this in photoshop (i'm an excellent photo retoucher & restorer, but my graphic design skills are pathetic) it would take me DAYS to try the different things i just ran through with that tool. IMO it's easily worth the cost-- the time savings for me will be huge. Ive played around with other 'template generators' but none ive seen have the wysiwyg, quality, and options of this one.

Spotted this issue - http://drupal.org/node/402578

This is one of the extremely rare examples of a time when I actually a) clicked on a banner ad (saw the Drupal logo), and b) bought the product within days of discovering it.

Yes, it has it's limitations.

Yes, the Drupal themes it exports are not perfect flexible themes with lots of features

Sadly, it doesn't offer the ability to change and add regions.

But to click a button, get a random design a few times until you find one you like, tweak the header, buttons, layout etc, and hit Export to Drupal to me is WELL WORTH the $130 they are asking. While I know how to do this from scratch in Photoshop, and then on to Notepad, HTML, CSS and finally Drupal, it takes hours, if not days. This is literally 5 minutes and I can have a client's site up and running.

I even re-created a current client's site in Artisteer because the original didn't have drop-down menus and I was dreading having to manually tweak the designer's CSS to make it work right.

I would highly recommend as long as you are at least intermediate in CSS and Drupal theming, so you can tweak things when you need to. And also if you're artistically challenged. Randomly generated themes are a boon to sparking the creative drive.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't going to replace a designer on any large projects, but for those small projects where a developer can't afford a designer, this is a good jumping off point. It's rather easy to create a simple serviceable theme which is all you need sometimes. I, also wrote up my thoughts on the product.

I am using version 2.

For the first time using the software, i feel very lucky to have the software in my pc BUT after applied it for my website then I got problem arose. Suddenly the problem is related to very important module which Nice Menus module.

The submenus cannot appear as normal because it is hiding behind the content layer. So, the theme will able to show the menu (parent) only, and if you're are lucky you will able to see only 10% of the submenus (if you resize or modify its margin)

Is anyone know how to fix this? I am very frustrated now because Artisteer's Forum wont help me nothing about this. :(

A friend recommended I check out Artisteer and I tried it just because he recommended it. I have to admit that my expectations were pretty low, so I may have been over impressed because I thought it was going to be horrible.

Basic thoughts:

• Yes, the designs it creates are pretty cookie cutter.
• No, it doesn't produce really Drupal oriented themes, to me they look more like wordpress themes.
• The themes are a little buggy with certain other drupal modules.
• Some of the "suggested" (read: random) settings are downright bad.
• Using some large JPGs can cause it to hang or crash.
• No liquid layout support.
• Rounded corners on blocks or menus make very bloated page layouts.
• Multi-column layouts are not search engine optimized.
• Generated layouts seem to always need hand tweaking.

But what I've also discovered is that 90% of my clients really like what it produces. I like that I can produce several different layout quickly and export as HTML/CSS that I can put up for my clients to see.

A few tips:

• If you select Menu -> Subitem -> Levels -> Multilevel, then you don't need nice_menus for a drop-down top menu, but you should make all primary-links expanded or it won't work like you'd expect.
• To make nice_menus work for right/left menus, remove some of the extra "overflow: hidden" style attributes from the style sheet.
• Artisteer doesn't support a logo the way most drupal themes do, but if you don't need it to be clickable, then just add your logo as the "Foreground Photo" and position it on the left.
• Expect to spend some time tweaking it to be the way you want it. Think of this as a 90% solution. (But we all know that that last 10% is the hardest and takes the most time.)

Also, it is better to create a supplemental style sheet by hand and add it to the .info file than to modify the style.css that is generated. That way if you have to re-generate the theme, you only have to make a single change to the info file.

All in all, I think this tool was well worth the price. Especially when I'm asked to make a web site for a friend or family member. Paying clients get a hand-built theme.

Good luck and enjoy.

I am not good for programming, and Artisteer 2 is a very good way for:
- people like me who want a fast and easy way to create a good looking website
- creating a working base to show to a client to explore in which direction the development should go. (mostly for graphic identity and stuff like that)
- making a simple website in case of emergency

Either way, I would find strange to use it to make “final products” for clients, and unless you have someone buying it for you, it seems expensive for a sandbox. I personally use it a lot for a personal website, but the trial version is enough. Once I’m happy with the layout, I simply get rid of the “trial” watermarks by replacing the exported image files with my own graphic elements.

In conclusion, I highly recommend using it as long as you don’t pay for it. In my opinion it’s only worth buying if you have to create a lot of simple-but-nice-looking websites within a short period of time for people (or even clients, why not) who are not too demanding.

Here's my review of Artisteer:

1. I'll start with the price first. It's $129 (USD) for the Standard Version which allows you to make Drupal themes. Is it worth it? I think so. I think that's cheap for what it does.

2. The amount of control that Artisteer gives you over styling menus, buttons, blocks, borders, headers, backgrounds, etc. is very impressive. It's an intuitive layout of the control panel as well - it takes less than 30 minutes to get it.

3. It saves you time. You can hack on a theme - load it up on a production site and test it out, then jump back into Artisteer and make changes and load it up again in no time.

4. For a LOT of applications the themes that Artisteer produces will be great. I know every designer cringes at using a program like this, and wants to say they produce "hand crafted themes" but give me a break. We all know lots and lots of clients that just need something original and simple and Artisteer can produce that for you. You can produce very novel themes with Artisteer especially if you load up your own design elements like pics and backgrounds, etc.

5. That being said, is there an 'Artisteer' look to the themes it produces? Yeah, there probably is. You will have to do some hacking on css to make it your own theme, but you have to do that anyway.

My recommendation: I would get it. It's gonna save you time on those projects that need an attractive, simple, theme fast. It will probably save you time on some higher level projects too.

p.s. Don't rip them off. If you use Artisteer for production sites pay them what they are asking for their product. From what I can see, they are trying to be responsive to the Drupal community's suggestions and gripes - let's return the favor by not stealing from them. We wouldn't like it if someone used our "hand crafted" themes without paying for them.

For those of you who sigh a lot over software like Artisteer, and others interested in learning how to do Drupal themeing the Drupal way - check out:

http://geeksandgod.connectedgeek.net/content/free-drupal-theme-workshop-...

A Video Tutorial on themeing by Bob Christenson of Mustard Seed Media.

I just tried this programme and installed an Artisteer-made theme on one project. When I open it now with IE6 it is very slow. Did anyone find the same problem???

I tried 2.0.2 a few weeks ago, it was really good but it lacked the "blocks"
v2.1 has many areas to put blocks and customize the final look of the site

that said I have to address the best feature of artisteer: the color suggestions!!
these people have actually grouped colors that go well together, and I really like it

I am not a themer, and I'm no artist either. I was having a really hard time finding colors that match for my own site only to find out that I could not read my site on a different monitor!!!!

But well... thats me :)

Artisteer is a great product especially for the price. Yes it could use some more features and still needs some work but for what you can do in the time you can do it the product is great. If your a themer its easy to create a theme with artisteer and change it up enough your self to make it fit your needs.

The only real problem I have found is panels integration. It seems difficult to get it to work but I think its more of the way panels integrates with your css files than the artisteer program itself. Although Artisteer should be the one to make itself work with panels sincle panels was here first.

Theres a few other things that need work but the program is pretty new. They fixed a lot going from 2.0 to 2.1 so well see what happens.

http://www.drupalthemesonly.com has several artisteer generated themes along with some that were made with artisteer and then tweeked.

Again its not an endall solution but there isn't one when it comes to theming.

Well after playing around with the demo version, I bit the bullet and purchased it. I'm really glad I did. If anything it gives me quick ideas wh I can tweak and customize through the program itself and then further tweak with CSS. Until I get a handle on themeing in Drupal, this is a godsend allowing me to get sites up and running quickly for impatient clients. 9 out 10 stars.

I've used it for 5 or 6 sites so far. People with solid theming skills may find it annoying, but I think it's awesome.

A couple issues:

After generating a new theme, I always have to tweak the page template files a bit
The version I bought (2 months ago) has very few block regions. this can be limiting...
If you make any manual changes to the CSS file and then use the software to make more changes, you'll have to manually update CSS again after.
There are a couple other weird issues (I've had some flags from contributed modules not display in the node footer)

Overall, it's awesome and I hope the authors keep developing it.

It's VERY easy to quickly create a good looking theme, even if you don't know CSS, HTML or PHP.

I was so excited when I found it. I bought it immediately. For me, it was totally worth it.

Have you cleared it with the authors? I am tempted to use this service.

We bought a license and tried it out. The theme breaks in IE6. It breaks to the extent that it freezes the browser and nothing works. PNGFix did not help either. Paul Hudson over at Artisteer has been less than eager to help, and belligerently points out that Drupal sucks for implementing the CSS and JS aggregation feature under 'Performance'. Rather than treat us like a proper paying customer, he's suggesting I prove to him that Artisteer themes are obliged to work with these performance features switched on. He thinks Drupal should fix the issue.

Bottomline is this: If you use modules such as ubercart that push the number of CSS over IE's limit, you need to have CSS aggregation turned on, and this means Artisteer will cause 20% of the world's browsers to freeze. Support at Artisteer will spend their time trying to prove you and Drupal wrong rather than fix the issue or treat you with any respect.

If you are a small time website, suggest you use themesfor5 - we got the first theme done through theme before buying the license. Buying a license was a total waste of money.

This is an FYI to everyone here: drupal.org is not a dumping ground for Point-and-click themes. We've already had problems from one user mass-creating 27+ themes that he obviously had no intent to support each and every one. Please see http://groups.drupal.org/node/24465 for the discussion on the policy.

There seems to be an issue when using the views module with artisteer themes. When overiding the setting of a page (making the page settings different than default) updating doesn't seem to work. This is an issue that apears to be unique to Artisteer themes and i don't know why or where it originates from. It is definiatly not a problem with the Views Module.

All in all I like artisteer to get a quick idea for what a page could look like. But I think it is better at that point to start from scratch, and reproduce what one wants. Although I am new to drupal and have no idea how to theme. And am not really looking forward to learning as I am trying to get this project completed. lol.

I think Steph's assessment is still pretty much spot on.

I've just started looking at it and I'm a Drupal newb so I'm a bit unbiased (er, ignorant I mean!) since I haven't made any themes yet :-)

It certainly looks like it can produce Drupal themes very quickly although it does force it's own view of the world on you. Menus, for example, seem to be limited to dropdown if you want to use secondary links. There may be other quirks and I'll be going over this discussion again and trying a few things before I part with real money.

One thing I've discovered already is that there are quirks in the Drupal Theme system that can cause grief to many themes, not just Artisteer ones.

They give you a 30 day trial so that should be plenty of time to make a call on the functionality.

Extra price is a big let down. You need to have the Standard Edition for Drupal or Joomla theme generation which is more than twice the price of regular version. It is a big time saver though specially for quick projects.

So I'm just getting started into website design and this software seems a relatively good choice for setting up my websites - are there any more customisable ones similar to this?

Thanks in advance!