I love theming Drupal sites. Yes, I realize that means I’m a super nerd. Drupal’s theme layer with its system of overrides is powerful. It works so well that I rarely need a starter theme, like Zen, Basic, Framework or NineSixty nowadays, other than as a reference and source of code snippets.

What Starter Themes Do

Drupal 6 saw a jump in the number of contributed starter themes on drupal.org. Now it’s much easier to find a list of all starter themes and there are a few great reviews and a comparison chart. Starter themes are a class of themes that attempt to generalize their features to speed up implementing a design for most any site, while encouraging best practices. They are popular among development teams since they help standardize theming when multiple people must touch the theme. They are also excellent demos of the power and potential of Drupal’s theme system, which makes them a great learning tool and source of documentation. Many starter themes are intended to be used as a base theme, where you create a sub-theme that draws off their files. This makes it easier to produce themes with fewer files and overrides, leaving the base/starter theme to do most of the heavy lifting.

A closer review of contributed starter themes reveals some recurring features, including: