Starter Themes

This page is a round up of themes that identify themselves as starter themes for Drupal.

A starter or "base" theme is one that typically has very little style and is designed to give you a head start building your own unique theme, usually using Drupal's subtheming.

Supporting this page is the Starter Theme Test Site showing all the contributed starter themes - use the theme switcher to change themes.

Log in and edit content and see some of the admin features - user: demo, pw: demo (occasionally the drag and drop features don't appear on the block admin page, I believe this is more to do with the theme switching than the actual theme itself).

Performance differences between well-known Drupal starter themes are very small (see Starter Theme Performance Metrics).

This is a list of themes that currently identify themselves as starter themes. At time of writing some of these projects were in early alpha release or still in development. You will need to check the releases for each project.

Starter themes that use a conventional layout method:

• AdaptiveTheme - A powerful starter theme with many layout and configuration options, including advanced theme settings to customize the layout and look of your site. Adaptivetheme also uses the Skinr module to provide advanced page and block layout options, menu styles and content alignment styles as well. Adaptivetheme also comes with 9 extra Panels 3 layouts built in, as well as full support for Gpanels and the block class and blocktheme modules. Adaptivetheme 6.x-2.x is built for subtheming. Careful attention has been paid to semantics, both in the HTML and CSS class naming. Accessibility and SEO are taken seriously with many accessibility features including proper usage and nesting of header elements, ARIA roles, skip navigation and the content is source ordered for better SEO and accessibility. The concept behind Adaptivetheme is that the theme should do the heavy lifting when it comes to layout and other features, so you can spend more time on design and styling the output.
• Basic - Originally a stripped down version of the Zen theme, Basic has now become its own concept of a theme starter.
• beginning - A blank canvas for theme developers.
• beginningW2 - A "Web 2.0 style" evolution from the beginning theme.
• Clean - A base theme with a focus on minimal implementation.
• Flexible - This theme is designed with accessibility in mind.
• Foundation - This is a liquid layout theme that handles layout for one, two, and three columns based on which blocks are enabled.
• FuelDeLuxe - A D6 starter theme. Successor of beginning. 90% based on Basic + integrates the Acquia Marina theme settings + extra stuff in template.php. Simple to use/integrate from PSDs.
• Genesis - An standards compliant, accessible and semantically rich starter theme. Genesis is easy to theme yet extremely flexible, giving you endless theming possibilities.
• Hunchbaque - A theme that makes formatting the underlying XHTML and CSS easier for the pure themer and gives a fairly blank canvas to work with.
• Layout Studio - A development theme for anyone who wants to quickly create custom themes while maintaining standards compliant and SEO friendly code.
• Stark - The Stark theme was recently added to Drupal 7. This is an exact copy backported to Drupal 6. The Stark theme is provided for demonstration purposes; it uses Drupal’s default HTML markup and CSS styles.
• Starkish - Starkish is a compromize between the styleless Stark theme and all the other bulky framework themes.
• Studio theme pack - This is a set of themes for use as a base in creating a new theme.
• Tendu - A light, stable, table-less and cross-browser theme that support RTL (right-to-left) and BiDi (bi-directional) layout "out of the box".
• Zen - A standards-compliant starting theme for Drupal. This theme has fantastic online documentation and tons of code comments for both the PHP (template.php) and HTML (page.tpl.php, node.tpl.php). With one, two, or three column layout of fixed or liquid width. The source order has content placed before sidebars or the navbar for increased accessibility and SEO.

Grid starter themes—these themes use a grid system for layout.

• ATCK - Advanced Theme Construction Kit, ATCK, is inspired by Yahoo's YUI grids.
• Blueprint - A starter Drupal theme meant to make development of custom themes faster. It uses the Blueprint CSS framework. By default, the grid is 950px wide, with 24 columns spanning 30px, and a 10px margin between columns.
• BlueTrip - The adaptation of the CSS framework BlueTrip for the Drupal system.
• Fluid Grid System - A new grid system that works on any width. You can select which grid to use (12/16/24), the page width, or the side margins. Use it the same way you would use Blueprint or 960.
• Framework - A user friendly starting point to help facilitate your theme development. Supports one, two, and three-column layouts. Set to a 24 column grid of 950px.
• Fusion - Fusion is a powerful base theme, with layout and style configuration options built in that you can control through Drupal's UI. It's based on a simplified 960px or fluid 16-column grid. It's designed to be used with the Skinr module, with numerous block styles included.
• NineSixty - Based on the 960 Grid System: width of 960 pixels, with two variants of 12 and/or 16 column grids. With optional content-first source order, swapping display order with NineSixty's pull & push classes. The new drupal.org theme (site redesign project) is 960.gs-derived, like NineSixty.
• Omega - The Omega theme is an advanced 960.gs base theme that utilizes functionality from several major themes, and incorporates the core Ninesixty functionality for grid management, but has an advanced theme settings interface to allow for grid management without editing code.
• YUI Grid - Clean, pure CSS table-less theme based upon YUI.
• Zen nineSixty - Zen with grids. This is the NineSixty theme developed as a Zen sub-theme. It inherits all the theme settings from the Zen theme (like inline block editing). You can modify or extend this sub-theme, or create a sub-sub-theme (Zen -> Zen nineSixty -> custom).