drupal

At our web agency THEM, we love Drupal. And we are actually not the only ones in the world to love it: 670,000+ people are part of the community, and thousands of websites worldwide are powered by Drupal.

Drupal may be not as popular as the two other major open source web Content Management Systems (CMS), namely WordPress and Joomla, but it is undoubtedly one of the most powerful. It can suit any kind of website, from corporate website to e-commerce platform. 

Not only is Drupal easy to maintain and flexible to future evolutions, the platform is also very SEO-friendly (read how important SEO is for your online business).

Another great advantage of Drupal is the way web design can be easily modified. In only one click, you can totally change the look of your website by using templates.

Here are 25 free themes compatible with Drupal 7 ranked by alphabetical order (click on titles to visit project's page):

1. Acquia Marina

Acquia Marina is a very popular Drupal 7 theme for businesses that is easy to customize. It is developed by TopNotchThemes in partnership with Acquia.

2. Acquia Prosper

Also developed by TopNotchThemes, Acquia Propser is an Ubercart e-commerce theme with great look and clean lines. 

3. Alphorn

Originally available for Drupal 6, Alphorn is now compatible with Drupal 7. It now supports displaying in mobile devices, including tablets. Alphorn is developed by SymphonyThemes.

4. Analytic

Designed and developed by Pixeljets, Analytic is a clean, modern and free theme, ideal for blogs, online media and communities.

5. Blue Masters

Originally based on a PSD template designed by Wendell Fernandes, Blue Masters is a beautiful Drupal template supported by More than Themes.

6. Busy

Busy is a simple and clean theme for companies only available for Drupal 7, and sponsored by Undpaul.

7. Colourise

Based on the work from Erwin Aligam, Colourise is a dark theme aimed at online communities.

8. Conch

Conch is a free theme with a vintage style. Like Alphorn, it is developed by Symphony Themes and suits any screen, from mobile devices to desktop computers.

9. Corolla

Corolla is an awesome and very popular theme among Drupal community. Highly stylized colorable, it allows you to totally customize the look and feel of your website. 

10. Corporate Clean

Corporate Clean is one of my favorite themes for Drupal with simple, clean and professional web design. I especially like the slideshow with the call-to-action buttons. Based on a PSD template designed by Zsolt Kacso, Corporate Clean is now supported by More than Themes.

11. Crystalline

Released a few months ago, Crystalline is a transparent theme that allows you to easily customize the style. Crystalline is sponsored by Rocket Theme.

12. Danland

Danland is an elegant theme for Drupal 7.x with an image slideshow (the feature can be switched off). This free theme is provided by Danetsoft.

13. Jackson

The Jackson Theme is an extremely professionally designed theme. Its great layout is perfect for SMS businesses.

14. Koi

Originally designed for WordPress by Nick La, Koi is an elegant free Drupal theme for online communities.

15. Libra

Libra’s clean design consists of blue sky colors reminding us the colors used by Twitter. It is designed by Glidea Web Agency and Drupal Soul, and only available for Drupal 7.

16. Marinelli

Marinelli is one of the most famous Drupal theme. It features a 3 column and tableless layout. 

17. MD Construction

MD Construction is an original under construction theme for Drupal. Very useful when you modify something in your website.

18. Newswire

Newswire is a 4 column, table-less, and fixed width theme for Drupal.  It offers many color options for the navigation bar and other blocks.

19. Omega

Omega Drupal theme is a powerful  HTML5/960 grid base theme that is highly configurable. Thousands of websites use it as their design theme. A few other themes are based on Omega.

20. Pixture Reloaded

Pixture Reloaded is a re-colorable theme powered by Adaptivetheme. It has great features such as mobile support, powerful layout engine and many more.

21. Sky

Similar to Pixture Reloaded, Sky is a center aligned theme with multi-column layout theme and some configurable color options.

22. Titan

Originally designed on WordPress by Drew Strojny, Titan is a free, classic, and efficient theme for Drupal 7.

23. Typebased

Typebased is a modern and relecorable blog theme. Original WordPress theme was designed by WooThemes.

24. Urban Solice

Urban Solice is a professionally designed and well-organized Drupal 7 theme. Its neutral color scheme and clean layout make it an ideal theme for small or medium-sized businesses.

25. Zero point

Zero Point is an advanced and clear theme developed by Dr. Radut to be ideal for a wide range of websites. 

Which one is your favorite? If you want to see more Drupal themes, you may be interested in reading our previous article on where to download the best Drupal templates.

In this post, you'll be able to find a collection of websites offering free and premium Drupal themes that can be downloaded and used as templates for your Drupal powered website.

Drupal is a free and open source Content Management System (CMS) largely used from small personal blogs to large corporate sites. It is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers.

Themes allow you to change the look and feel of your Drupal site. These contributed themes are not part of any official release and may not work correctly. You have to use matching versions of themes with Drupal. For example, themes released for Drupal 5.x will not work for Drupal 6.x.

Free Drupal themes

You can find below a collection of websites offering free Drupal templates:

• Drupal's official website, hundreds of contributed themes are available for download. You can search for themes and filter by compatibility (from 4.7.x to 7.x). Each theme is well documented (features, developers, versions, etc.).

• 120 Free Essential Drupal 6.x Themes by tripwire magazine : collection of themes organized in 5 categories (flexible multi-column, 1-column, 2-column, 3-column and 4-column themes).

• CSS Galleries: Free Web Designs for Download posted by ramiro on SEO Expert blog (consists of a large collection of free CMS templates, including Drupal's).

• Drupal-theme, dozens of themes can be downloaded from the website. Useful themes categories : version, number of columns, corporate, blog, etc.

• Drupalthemes, website where users can submit their Drupal theme and rate the others. If you look for templates, you can filter by version, number of columns and color.

• Themebot, more than 100 Drupal templates available for download.

• Drupal2u, more than 230 Drupal templates, possibility to filter by version, number of colums, color, category, etc.

• SiteGround, a few Drupal themes (various templates for preview and download)

Premium Drupal themes

For those who are willing to pay for theme custom development, some websites offer premium Drupal templates:

• Templates Hunt, almost 500 Drupal themes offered on the website. You can pay a regular price or a unique price (meaning you're the last one who can download the template).

• WooThemes, only 2 Drupal themes available. One (Bueno) is nevertheless free.

• Themesnap, a few but very well design themes. The sites announces one or two new premium Drupal templates per month.

• Beautiful Drupal

Showcase Drupal powered websites

Among the websites showcasing Drupal powered websites, I'd like to mention:

• Drupal Museum, gathering artfully designed websites.

• Drupalbased, offering hundreds of examples that can be filtered by category.
  

• CMS Showcase: 31 Remarkable Drupal Powered Websites, from personal blogs to fully-featured business websites, posted by Jacob Gube:

Besides, Drupal Worx offers an interesting tutorial about how views theming is done.

(you can find the first post on how to optimize your chinese urls for baidu here)

In this post you will learn seo tips for generating seo friendly urls, especially in the case of chinese content : url rewriting, url aliasing and transliteration for chinese title. Then we will put in practice this tips with drupal.

1- Url rewriting

First of all, i hope you all already activated url rewriting for your website, it is a very basic thing when you begin to think about your search engine optimization.
 

What does it mean ?
Except if you create all your web pages manually, when you use a framework or a CMS to generate your pages, urls would usually look like:

htpp://www.example.com?q=node/1.
Your aim is to clean all the mess in that kind of urls and make it more search engine friendly.
 

There are two places where you can apply the rewriting :

1. let the web server manage it : for example in apache in your .htaccess file
2. manage it in your code, by using aliases for your pages

This 2 ways can be combined, for example in drupal, the "?q=" will be removed by apache and the aliases are handled by the drupal php code.
and so
htpp://www.example.com?q=node/1
become as by magic :
http://www.example.com/my-article-title

2- Url aliasing

Of course you can create and manage your aliases manually, but for a large website the best thing to do is to automate this action.
For example you can build a system that take your page titles and creates an alias with it.
A good idea cause most of the time, important keywords will be already in the title of your page, so that will improve your SEO.

But don't forget, there is a pretty annoying limit in the actual web standards : url encoding should only use ASCII character-set. So when you alias your urls, you should remove all special characters, accents, spaces and of course... chinese characters!

We've already seen last time that webmasters are using url encoding functions to deal with this issue. For example in php you can use this urlencode() function : http://cn.php.net/urlencode.
It simply returns a string in which all non-alphanumeric characters except "-" "_" and "." have been replaced with a percent (%) sign followed by two hex digits, like it is said in the web bible.

But this is not the optimum, and you will have to adapt this function in order not to encode some special characters like "é" "à" and "ç"... but just replace them by e a c; and also replace spaces by a "-". In that way search engines can still understand and distinguish your words and keywords.

3- transliteration for chinese characters

Let's see the case of chinese characters now.
The best search engine friendly solution is to automatically change your titles into pinyin cause web search engines are able to :

• recognize pinyin
• identify pinyin words
• link pinyin words and chinese characters

So if you are talking about cars on a chinese website page and your page's title is 汽车.
Now if you use the transliteration into pinyin of this title for your url (http://example.com/qiche), search engines will be able to recognize in this url that the page is about cars.  (qiche is the pinyin for cars)
 

And so you will improve your rankings ;o)

4- using drupal with transliteration

Using the powerful web framework drupal, you will be able to activate all this tips almost without touching a piece of code (we know, that's amazing). I listed for you the modules you will need to activate :

• Clean url : simply activate this to remove the "?q=" in the url
• Path : add the possibility to rename URLs using aliases
• Pathauto : provides a mechanism for modules to automatically generate aliases for the content they manage (using page titles for example)
• Transliteration : provides a central service for transliteration

Then, in your pathauto.inc file, simply add this line of code line 170 :
if (module_exists('transliteration'))

{ $output = transliteration_get($output); }

You should now have dramatically improved  your url search engine optimization for chinese content!

would you have good or bad comments, please write them below.

cheers