As soon as I saw that TemplateMonster was offering Drupal themes, I had to take a closer look. In my earlier web design days, I admit that I’d used several templates from their site upon the request of clients. However, once div-based CSS layouts became predominant, TemplateMonster’s love of tables and inflexibility became tiring.

My first reaction to their Drupal themes was a bit of concern, knowing their track record with other complex themes and questionable legal history. But they couldn’t be that bad, right? At least they’re giving end users some choice in a world where beautiful Drupal themes aren’t on every corner.

You could argue that a competing provider of Drupal themes isn’t the best critic — but we know our stuff, and I think you’ll find this evaluation enlightening and also generally useful when evaluating the quality of any Drupal theme. Also, it’s difficult to find objective information about TemplateMonster, since most reviews are glowingly positive and just happen to be written by members of their affiliate program.

So, here are the facts…

How to determine the quality of a Drupal theme

We actually covered this topic at the Berkeley Drupal user group this summer. There are plenty of indicators of the quality of a Drupal theme if you know where to look. Web standards, flexibility, design quality, features, module support, regions, and more.

Let’s look at a TM theme in particular. We looked at the free sample theme that TemplateMonster provides and figured that this can’t be representative of their themes at large, so another theme was in order. Jeremy noticed a theme that had a similar look and feel as one of ours, so we could do a head-to-head comparison.

We purchased Website Template #19744 (shown above) for Drupal 6, for the regular, non-unique price of $58.

Web coding and design standards

Well, it doesn’t completely fail validation.

Empty span and td tags though. Speaking of those td tags…

Yeah. Tables. All tables for layout. So why is this bad, other than because someone says it’s "not standard"?

• Poor SEO
• Very hard to update layout and change things around
• Fixed column widths, with no collapsible blocks and regions

If you’re a coder, here’s a small sample that will (hopefully) make you cringe:

This kind of non-useful naming is persistent throughout classes, graphics, and markup, which can make a theme difficult to work with.

There’s also this font family declaration: "font-family:Arial;"

Family? More like an orphan. So, on something other than Windows, which has Arial pre-installed, you’re going to get an ugly serif font instead. [Edit: George in the comments pointed out that Macs do have an Arial installed as well as Helvetica — but still, best practice is to specify a hierarchy of fonts]

Rounded corners are individual images rather than a single image sprite using CSS for positioning. This leads to more requests to your server and poorer performance. Also, font sizes are in px rather than em or percentages, which isn’t recommended for accessibility reasons, since it doesn’t resize well across browsers.

There’s also random sloppiness, like typos, commented out chunks of code, no CSS spacing defined between paragraphs (so all your body text will run together), and no if statements around print statements.

Drupally stuff — regions, flexibility, and other features

The regions (containers where you put your blocks of content in Drupal) are not collapsible in this theme, meaning that you will always have this exact layout shown, with a main content column and two sidebars on the right. Okay, so collapsible regions aren’t a feature of all themes out there, so we can’t hold too much against them. Just something to keep in mind.

The theme’s .info file reveals a header region. Hmm… that’s funny. I don’t recall seeing a header region on the blocks page. Ah, that explains it — the region isn’t being printed in page.tpl.php!

Now here comes one of my biggest beefs in terms of completely, 100% not understanding Drupal whatsoever — that nice sidebar region block styling? Most of it is being done on a specific, per block basis. So the fonts, positioning, and other styling depends on you using only Drupal’s core blocks, with CSS IDs like #block-comment-0!

You’re making us look bad…

Competition aside, I’m concerned that using a Drupal theme from TemplateMonster could be off-putting to users adopting Drupal. After all, who is most likely to buy a TM Drupal theme? Yep, new users. And this isn’t the kind of theme quality I feel good about new users experiencing.

TemplateMonster currently offers 75 Drupal themes for purchase on their site. The themes range from $50-$66 and buyout prices are $425-$1,850. Most of these themes are actually ported from their Joomla themes.

They don’t offer support (but they do have paid customizations), and of all the cases I’ve found like the osCommerce one linked above, no one seems to have been successful in getting a refund.

It may sound like a steal, but there’s a reason our themes are more expensive — it takes time, effort, and expertise in many different areas to create a good Drupal theme.

Save yourself a big headache and avoid TemplateMonster Drupal themes. Go somewhere else, anywhere else. Find a free theme you like and hire someone for a few hours’ of customization. And we’re not the only ones out there offering high quality Drupal themes* (we’re just the best, teehee).

Who knows if TemplateMonster will actually read this, but if they do: HEY TEMPLATE MONSTER! EVEN YOUR COMPETITORS WANT YOU TO STOP MAKING DRUPAL THEMES THAT SUCK!

Any questions?

Since I’ve got a real, live TemplateMonster Drupal theme in my hands, if you’ve got any burning questions about their themes, just leave a comment. Big thanks to Jeremy who did the dirty work getting up to his elbows in code and testing out the themes.

* We haven’t personally reviewed the themes in these links, but at least they are created by reputable professionals in the Drupal community who appear to know their stuff!

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