By stodge on

Which are the best themes to use while experimenting with Drupal? I've installed a few but they really don't look good at all. I've browsed through the themes here but it's a long and painful process. I don't want to develop my own theme as I'm more learning about Drupal's features. Working on a theme would be a future task, if it becomes necessary. Cheers

⋅ Categories: Drupal 8.x

Comments

gisle’s picture

gisle
he/him
Primary language Norwegian Bokmål
Location Norway
commented

I've installed a few but they really don't look good at all.

First, decide out what you want to do. Do you want a theme that looks good, or one that is designed to be experimented with? (Because unfortunately, I do not think that you can find a single Drupal theme that gives you both.)

Themes that are designed to be experimented with are known as base themes. They tend to have a rather bare bones appearance out of the box, and you need to create your own subtheme to make them look good.

To get an overview, you may try to search for a theme.

All the most popular ones, such as "Bootstrap" and "Barrio" are base themes. Don't expect them to look good without creating a subtheme to flesh them out.

Personally, I only use base themes on the Drupal websites I design (YMMV). This is because I need to customize the look and feel of the finished site to match the client's brand. Hence, I have limited experience with Drupal themes that are are not base themes, but instead designed to look good "as is". However, I see that "Bootstrap Mint" and "Creative Responsive Theme" are quite popular (I have not used those myself, tho').

- gisle

stodge’s picture

stodge commented

Thanks. I don't want to experiment with the theme, I want one that looks decent while I experiment with Drupal's features.

fkelly12054@gmail.com’s picture

fkelly12054@gmail.com commented

I've had good luck with:

https://www.drupal.org/project/d8w3css

It's well supported and well documented and NOT based on bootstrap.  Pretty straightforward to set up a subtheme.  You just basically need to set up your block layout and color scheme ... which you will need to do for any theme. 

drupaldope’s picture

drupaldope commented

yes I second this.
D8W3CSS is a CSS framework similar to Bootstrap or Bulma, but more lightweight and fast.

jamescarvell’s picture

jamescarvell commented

The Theme D8W3CSS however has a proprocess_breadcrumb-function which adds the page-title if it's not empty. Thus the title shows up twice.

fkelly12054@gmail.com’s picture

fkelly12054@gmail.com commented

Always a good idea to check the theme's issue page.  Your issue was addressed there, with a solution given.

https://www.drupal.org/project/d8w3css/issues/3200606

One of the reasons I recommended the theme is that there is good support.  This is not always true in contrib land.

e3g’s picture

e3g commented

I've enjoyed playing with the Umami theme oriented around recipes.