Five Awesome (Free) Drupal Themes

One of the most popular CMS systems in Drupal doesn't usually get the attention it deserves - at least here at Website Magazine. Choosing between open-source and commercial platforms is a difficult decision (as we address in relation to e-commerce systems in our April special issue) and requires serious consideration. That being said, Drupal is the choice of many Web professionals for good reason: it's as stable as it gets and extensible to the point of envy for other providers, thanks to some terrific modules.

In my ten-year history as a Web pro, I've only used Drupal in one other installation. A micro-project I'm working on, however, required a CMS, and instead of trying to hack up WordPress to act like a CMS, I thought I would just give Drupal another go, as the community has seen a lot of development since the last time I had the opportunity.

I tested about ten themes from the last night for the website project and finally settled on one (Acquia Marina) but others would have done an equally nice job in presenting the content. I was surprised at the number of themes that were simply reworked Wordpress themes ported to Drupal (some of which are listed below). There are several Drupal-only themes in the list as well.

	A3 Atlantis - Modern Drupal theme designed by Blamcast. Features nice typography, small files sizes and smart columns for adjusting between 1, 2 or 3 columns. Fully XHTML compliant and CSS Level 3 compliant.
	Acquia Marina - Solid theme by TopNotchThemes in partnership with Acquia. Features 15 collapsible block regions, drop-down links menu, includes icons for core and Views blocks. Cross-browser tested in IE6/7, Opera, Safari, and Firefox.
	Amity Island - A fresh Drupal theme (the first under the GPL license from ThemeShark). Features a tableless design, eight additional and fully collapsible regions and one level of suckerfish dropdowns.
	AppleWeb - This tableless, W3C compliant layout by TemplateWorld (Drupal theme by Neerja Software) has been tested for CSS 2.1 and is XHTML 1.0 Strict. Works with IE7, Firefox, Safari and even Chrome.
	Color Papper - A Drupal theme originally created by DreamTemplate for WP. The attractive design comes with a fixed-width layout with two columns, is CSS based (level 2.1) and validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict.