Themes

A while back I wrote a post on what I thought were the best Drupal 7 themes, but in that post I focused solely on those that were available for free. I decided it was finally time to write up a companion to that piece on the the best premium Drupal themes out there.

Most premium themes are very reasonably priced - under a $100. A fair number of them also include the layered PSD files so they can be easily modified by a designer, which may come in handy if you're working for an organization with a tight budget.

It's been said - with good cause - that Drupal lags competitors a bit with regard to the quality of the premium themes that are available. I'm happy to say that this gap is closing as more and more theme developers turn out high quality designs. Here, in no particular order, are five premium themes I think deserve some attention.

Over the past six months, responsive web design has gone from being a hot trend to an emerging standard. Not to be left behind, Drupal theme developers have begun to produce some excellent responsive themes. Here's what you need to know.

Adding stylesheets to a web page is one of the first things a designer or developer learns how to do, but adding a stylesheet the "Drupal way" calls for a different approach. In my rush to finish the custom theme for my first Drupal site, I skipped the documentation on adding CSS and simply placed a link to the stylesheet in the page.tpl.php template file. 

It's a little embarrassing to admit this mistake now, but it wasn't such a bad guess, really. After all, adding styles to a template file is the preferred method in other flavors of web development. But by adding my CSS in this way, I bypassed Drupal's stylesheet aggregation and compression, and in doing so, lost a nice little performance boost. 

Now that you know how you shouldn't add your styles, here are three ways to correctly add them to your Drupal theme.