Check out our themes!
We’ve got dozens of premium themes for Drupal 5 and 6 ready for download now!
Browse Drupal themes
Using Ubercart? Our e-commerce themes will have your online store looking like a custom e-commerce site in minutes
Generate your own Drupal themes -- too good to be true?
Artisteer has been generating some buzz lately. With this (Windows-only, as of this time) software, you can generate unlimited static XHTML/CSS, Wordpress, Joomla, and now with the $129.95 "Standard Edition", Drupal themes.
This could be an exciting way for theming, a historically challenging endeavour for new and experienced Drupallers alike, to be within reach for many more users.
The premise seemed a bit hokey at first after watching their demo — Artisteer doesn’t ‘come with’ themes, it generates them from random or assembled collections of combinations of different aspects of your theme, such as:
- Layout
- Color scheme
- Header
- Background images
- Typography
- Article styles
- Block styles
- Buttons
- Menu
I had to see this for myself and downloaded the trial.
Generating random styles
Clicking the "Suggest Design" button repeatedly, I had a parade of theme after theme, with layouts and text styles and colors changing before my eyes! A particularly neat feature is that you can isolate this random generation to any sub-section of your theme. Perhaps one of the designs catches your eye but the header and button styles are totally wrong. So, you just click "Suggest Buttons" and everything else stays in place while the buttons randomize.
After playing with the random themes for a while, digging in a bit further revealed an astonishing amount of options. I can see how you could be lost in this for hours, endlessly tweaking things like button corner radius, gradient parameters, and block title spacing. It’s a control freak’s dream.
Artisteer gives you many nice touches that have historically been lacking from Drupal themes compared to other CMSes, such as icons for node links and styling for tables, bullets, and blockquotes.
The theme formula
However, for better or for worse, you’re basically generating a blog theme. You can choose between one, two, or three columns, and the position and widths of these, but that’s it. The header and footer are not actually regions, just where your site info/menu, and footer message are printed.
There’s also certainly a formula at work here, and while I was quite impressed at the breadth of different designs and looks you could create, you’re going to have a certain cookie-cutter look to any theme that comes out of it. It’s basically a generic-looking Wordpress theme, with different styles of a handful of elements and a decidedly blog-like focus. The good news is that’s all many people need!
Under the hood
So, now the question in many minds I’m sure: how is the code?
Actually… pretty good! Valid CSS/XHTML, no nested table mess, and a reasonably good understanding of Drupal. I spotted a few issues, such as non-wrapping block titles and font sizes specified in px, but overall quite good. For reasons I’m not entirely sure, they included a page-blog.tpl.php and page-node-add.tpl.php, with identical code as the parent template file. Also, while I didn’t test on a Drupal 5 site, they appear to be both Drupal 5 & Drupal 6 compatible. Perhaps someone more well-versed than I in PHP could actually take a look at the template.php code being generated here.
You can download three themes I generated with the trial version (with their watermarks) and take a look for yourself.
What does this mean
What does this mean for Drupal or those who are considering using it to create their theme?
I can see a few interesting outcomes:
If you want a simple blog-style theme and/or need to create many themes quickly (and use Windows), this looks like a great option.
I think we’ll see a flood of themes generated by Artisteer, for both noble and less-than-noble purposes. It would be great to get a whole pile of nicer ones out to the Drupal community. Artisteer’s FAQ says that themes that don’t use header stock photos can be redistributed. I don’t know about the license status of the icons or other textures used though. I recognize some of them from common free icon packs, but I don’t know if they’re GPL (and thus could be added on drupal.org). I’m sure there are SEOs out there cooking up dozens of these as I write this to release with their footer links. There are already sites selling them…
If there’s anything Drupal needs, it’s more viable options for decent themes, even if some of these options may make Drupal purists cringe a little.
Your thoughts?
What do you think about this software? Have you tried it?
Do you think this is a good thing for Drupal?
dang, that's pretty impressive, definately going to try this, not saying I would ever buy it, because it seems a bit "cheap" compared to doing it manually, but it's nice that it's out there
too bad it isn't open source :P
It takes the "creative" aspect out of design. Kind of ruins the spirit of making themes.
However, that doesn't mean its not impressive. But if everyone used that product, then sites would be saturated with that look (even if there is a variety going on).
The point of going to TNT or any other professional theme place is you want quality, hand-crafted work. (TM)
The fact that this software or that any theme developer use px for fonts is not an issue. In fact I prefer using to define font size in px as well as many other designers.
As for this software, I'll wait for a Mac version to give it a try.
Wow that looks very cool.
This is a great innovation that we can learn from. I bet we can do very similar things with Theme (Settings) API and a truckload of JQuery ;)
Jacques, actually not all browsers support resizing of px-based font sizes, which greatly reduces accessibility: http://www.webaim.org/techniques/fonts/#relative
I bought the standard edition tonight and generated a theme for a site I've been working on lately. As a developer with little experience developing themes for customers this is a win for me. I've got some experience with Dreamweaver but little experience manipulating CSS. I'm learning as much as I can and this tool will help me to learn more. It's got it limits but I can help some of my clients and that's really the bottom line for me at this point.
It does a pretty good job at creating joomla templates as well. It is not perfect (see http://tr.im/hkn4) but for someone with design ideas but without the css skills its a great start.
Added to DrupalSightings.com
I've been experimenting with the program and I think it is great, generally. It is very easy to change designs, colors, icons, with an ease and quickness that will help many. Making the themes actually work in drupal, however, appears more difficult.
One standout is that if you have a 2 bar theme (so both on the right, lets say) and drupal has one bar empty it just shows an empty place instead of resizing the body to accommodate the lack of a bar.
Another I've found is the forum and ubercart pages - actually any page with a table appears in most designs to move all the sidebars to the bottom of the content area taking the full width.
(This is on drupal 5, haven't tested 6 yet)
So right now if you have very fixed content and strict design like a blog it works great, probably even in drupal. For more dynamic sites with panels, forums, ubercart stores, etc. it will probably shorten some development time, but I would guess it will take another 5 hours or so after the export to make it actually work. I'm fairly sure they will work these issues out, however, and it would be good to get more drupal developers using the software. It will ease much of our work without doubt.
Thanks for the detailed feedback Chad!
As someone who designs a lot of smaller websites in Drupal, the budgets for these projects don't allow much time for design. I just downloaded the Artisteer trial after reading this yesterday, and today I decided to buy it. I realize that the sites I design with it won't win any design awards, but it will easily pay for itself and allow me to accomplish a lot more in less time.
It is a useful tool for some, but still misses the point, we can create compliant themes from psds in about an hour or so that are fully functional and working. There is much more to a theme than just the features shown here, and in fact we already have themes developed that allow full colour change. http://www.prodrupalthemes.co.uk/projects
I bought it a few days after it was released. It works great for a freelancer like me with smaller clients and simple websites. However, after 2 weeks of using it, I think I'd prefer to learn theme drupal the "traditional" way. If I was already themer, I would not buy it. It's not very flexible: does not allow you to create custom block regions, no fluid layout, font sizes in px, browser compatibility problems (yes, I was so excited by the trial version, I bought it and installed Windows on my Macbook!) After generating the theme, I find myself having to do as much work customizing it as I would for the free themes available on drupal. I would say, it's awesome for amateur freelancers but not the tool of the professional.
I agree with a lot of the comments here. It is good to put together some basic templates quickly. Ultimately if you want more functionality you will find that you will have to do a lot of tweaking. The way it builds the templates does not always lend its self to being able to do this easily and not all addons function well with the generated themes. Once they build in more functionality it should improve the usefulness of Artisteer quite a bit.
Artisteer looks interesting, but ...
For non-free product, it's not so good.
You need to pay 50$ for the product, and you can't create really great themes (as TNT themes) and there is no flexibility.
Yes, TNT themes are more expensive (than 50 $), but if you wish to have quality, you need to pay more than 50 $ or you have to do it yourself.
Sounds like it is just confusing the landscape. More helpful would be having some themes that are well-enough designed to allow the flexibility on their own without having to be "separated" from the standard tree.
Blown away my the versatility of this program. I bought it today and I can already see saving many hours with standard CSS and XHTML coding. Bravo Artisteer.
I was first completely ignoring Artisteer, as there were ads for it on nearly every Drupal site.
But actually I am quite impressed. I think I am going to buy it, its simply incredibly cheap and hopefully sufficient for small sites with limited content.
My primary approach is to use drupal templates and modify them, but it takes quite a lot of time, and most of them do not look as good as your acquia marina or similar themes.