When we started planning Drupal Gardens 18 months ago one of our goals was to help break down the barriers to creating stunning Drupal web sites. To that end we developed the Drupal Gardens' ThemeBuilder -- to allow people to point and click to create uniquely designed web sites, even if they don't know what CSS is or don't have the time to learn Drupal 7's powerful theme system. Read full article »

Yesterday we completed our pre-DrupalCon sprint and are excited to introduce several great new features, with a special focus on designers and site creators who need an awesome looking site. Specifically in this release we have added great support for professional fonts. As designers know, font selection is one key area where average web sites are separated from remarkable sites. In the past, font options for web sites were limited or complex to implement: you could create your own images with embedded expensive licensed fonts, or you could purchase, install and embed fonts yourself. Read full article »

I'm happy to have seen the good response to my "What shall we do about themes?" post. I'm particularly glad to see a bunch of self-described designers participating, and to see the thoughtfulness of the comments.

From the 50+ comments, a few consistent messages emerged (no editorial pen here; just consolidating / summarizing): Read full article »

Update - 22 Feb 2010: One of the issues lightly touched on below is the market need for some themes besides those on drupal.org. Acquia has started to collect both themes, as well as links to theme providers, at a new site devoted to the design-aspects of Drupal. See design.acquia.com for more information.

(Original post follows.)

For almost as long as I've been involved with Drupal, there's been a running complaint – either a (false) perception or (true) reality – that Drupal is "theme-challenged" compared to alternatives like Joomla and WordPress. I had this complaint myself when I first started using Drupal. Our investors heard it during their due-diligence on Drupal. And I continue to hear it from people I meet who are building their first Drupal site.

I've got some cycles now to pay some concentrated attention to this, and see if there's something we can do about it (where "we" means both Acquia and the Drupal community at large.)

I encourage you to add your comments / thoughts to this blog post. In fact, my primary purpose in this post is to listen to people. So read on, and give me your thoughts. Read full article »

What's the problem - really?

The first thing to do is to characterize the complaints. I think there are (at least) two high-level areas of interest:

Our friends at TopNotchThemes have built a second theme for Acquia Drupal, our distribution of Drupal, and we've released it as a project on Drupal.org.  Called Acquia Slate, it is a flexible, configurable Drupal theme with a somewhat corporate look and feel. Read full article »