Ready to please: Drupal themes that customize good

These here themes, they customize up real good, they do.

Moving beyond your first site(s) and that Garland theme? (It's so spiffy, but just leaves you hungry for more...) As a new Drupaler, you'll see that massive Santa's bag of themes at drupal.org, and go nutsy-whacko, downloading everything in sight. "Oooh, look at this one... and I know I can use that one... and wow, this one, so green..." 

And you'll install your new two dozen themes to play with, and you'll find much good... and much other. 

They're not all created equal; some just don't look as nice (or work as nicely) as you thought they would. More commonly, you'll find that a theme's clever and lovely designer has created a theme that's stupendous, but just not right for your needs. Common features that leave me crestfallen: Lack of a sidebar or other region I was hoping to see; text format bummers (like block quotes that appear no different from other text, or h3 and h4 headline tags that look the same); and admin pages that "break" and become unusable due to width issues.

That's OK; once you're past that first site or few, you'll feel the bug to make any theme all your custom own! It turns out that while some of those themes don't excite out of the box, they customize well, amiably changing form with easy CSS tweaks.

Good moddin'

On his blog, Geshan lists themes he's found easy to mod in 5 Drupal themes I've worked on. Let me make a similar list of my own here:

1. Zen

This site itself uses DRUPALACE ZEN, based on the popular beginner's theme, Zen. There's a link there to great documentation, too – so if you want to start playing with themes, you could do worse than to start here. (I found it much easier to mod than Garland.)

I'm by no means satisfied with DRUPALACE ZEN, so expect some changes. (New computer! Time for serious work.)

Experience Zen

2. Four Seasons

Ah, I really like this one! With its fancy-schmancy control in the header that lets any site visitor change theme color elements and font size, I feared it'd be a theme full of difficult-to-mod tricks. But it turned out to be an easy mod, at least as far as major elements are concerned. 

Four Seasons looks great, with the three columns I crave. And while a white background seems blah to some energetic designers, I find any background other than white feels troublesome later, with the need to tweak ads, photo backgrounds, and other elements to match a specific background color.

Love those Four Seasons

3. Foliage

I didn't play with this theme so much – simply because I like it so much as-is. It's simple and understated, with a nice white background and flexible column number. It lends itself well to tweaks. What's not to like?

Mmm. Mellow.

Lose yourself in Foliage

4. Green'n'Black

I didn't think this one looked like much out of the box. But it's easy to mod, and it retains a bold charm after basic tweaks.

A warning, though: Like too many themes, this one leaves the Themes admin form unusable for me (the Enable and Default radio buttons are not visible). That's a big demerit. : (

Color yourself Green'n'Black

5. Marinelli 

This one is a little in-your-face with the bold blue background. It also needs some basic tweaks: if I recall correctly, there's little to differentiate header tags, for example. But it cleans up well. (And doesn't look all bad as-is, either!)

I believe I'm still missing some things I'd like, though, such as a secondary menu. That's a bigger tweak than h3 tags and the such, as would be re-positioning the two sidebars to the left and right, not both on the right as they are now. Depending on what you want, Marinelli may not be the easiest starting point, but it's worth a download.

(The 6.x version offers secondary menus and rotating banners, something I still have planned for a 5.x installation.)

Get Marinelli

And you, Reader?

What themes have you found really friendly – or unfriendly – toward the modder?