Finding a Drupal theme for news

By nsoonhui on 1 May 2009 at 11:38 UTC

Hello,

I am finding a suitable Drupal theme for news. My requirements are:

1.the ability to put the login block, and the user information menu at the top of the screen.
2. the ability to put a menu constructed using nice menu mode, at the content top area.
3. supports both 2 and 3 column layout

I don't mind shelling out my credit card to buy one, but the most important thing is I must make sure that what I buy, I can use.

Anyone has any suggestion?

Comments

Some options

glennr commented 1 May 2009 at 14:53

I agree with you in a way: there aren't many really good "out of the box" Drupal themes, and many themes lack attention to detail. However, in defence of the theme authors, Drupal's great strengths -- its flexibility and extensibility -- make it virtually impossible to create the perfect theme for every need. There's no way any theme can have in-built formatting for every contributed module, for example.

It's for this reason starter themes are so popular among the Drupal community. Many choose to create their own custom themes based on one of these starter themes.

That said, there are some good, free, ready-made themes, such as Pixture Reloaded, Acqua Marina, Newswire, Analytic, Four Seasons, and The Morning After. In your blog, you mention you like the commercial Endless News theme, so have you checked out WorthAPost's free themes? If the free ones are OK, then Endless News should be at least as good. Some of the above themes include super-fish (or similar) drop-down menus, and I'm pretty sure all have collapsible multi-column layouts. I'm not sure if any offer the login block that you want, but you could theme it yourself or try the UserLoginBar module.

Unfortunately, no matter what theme you choose, it will probably need some customising to your needs, for the reasons given above. If you're willing pay, one option might be to ask the author of the theme you like the most to make the changes that you need. Either that or you'll need to get into Drupal theming yourself.