Posted on Tue, May 19, 2009 by Jay Batson
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.
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:
