Ask anyone about Drupal’s strengths, and they’ll talk about content modeling: custom content types, views, workflows, and permissions that can be built entirely through the UI. No other CMS matches Drupal’s flexibility for complex information architectures.
But once the backend is in place, you still need to make it usable and beautiful for real people. And that’s where things get hard.
Drupal theming is expensive.
Theming in Drupal has historically been expensive and complex. Unlike WordPress or Webflow, you can’t just drop in a template and go. A proper Drupal theme requires specialized knowledge of:
- Render arrays, preprocessing, Twig
- Use of Drupal behaviors,
Drupal.dispace(), and its JavaScript API - Hybrid backend/frontend interfaces such as tabs, the node preview toolbar, responsive tables
- Drupal’s messages need to work when invoked via PHP, and with JavaScript
- …and so on
And that’s just the Drupal side of the equation. A serious theme also has to get the fundamentals right:
- Design & usability
- Accessibility compliance
- Code organization and maintainability
- Performance
Headless has its own set of problems
With so much complexity, developers frequently throw their hands up and say, “Screw it! We’re throwing away the entire front-end”, and choose to decouple the front-end from the backend.
But this doesn’t solve the complexity, it simply moves it around (and frequently increases it). Now you have two codebases. Deploying these together frequently involves a rube-goldberg machine involving a hamster running on a wheel somewhere. And React (the most frequently used frontend architecture when decoupling) comes with its own set of technical debt. Worse, you can lose some of Drupal’s best features: Views, display modes, content previews, and more.
The Real Business Problem: Cost of Ownership
Drupal’s theming challenges directly increase the cost of ownership. That’s a big reason Drupal has been losing market share.
Drupal’s leadership team recognizes this, and is answering that with Drupal CMS (aka Starshot). Within the Drupal Starshot product strategy, one of the two strategic shifts is for Drupal to
Extend our presence in the mid-market segment, targeting projects with total budgets (including design, development, hosting, and maintenance) between €25,000 and €100,000 (roughly, $30,000 USD to $120,000 USD).
To that end, incredible work is being done with Drupal Canvas (formerly known as Experience Builder) and the Drupal CMS design system.
But there’s still a gap: competitors like WordPress (20,000+ themes), Webflow (7,000+), and Wix (2,000+) have vibrant theme ecosystems. Drupal? Only about 400 themes, of which many of them are starter or admin themes.
Why now is the time for premium Drupal themes
Drupal has had commercial themes for a very long time, but they’re very limited. Prior to Single Directory Components (SDCs), it was next to impossible because the theme layer didn’t know what markup, CSS classes, or DOM structure existed, which made it impossible to ship a complete, styled experience. Vendors worked around this by shipping content models within custom modules, but that took away Drupal’s flexibility.
This all changed with the advent of SDCs in Drupal 10.1. With SDCs, a theme can now ship a full library of pre-built, accessible, and performance-optimized components. All you need to do is wire in Drupal’s data through code, or even through UI with modules such as SDC Display or Drupal Canvas.
The hard parts (accessibility, Drupal-specific UIs, performance) can now be solved once, saving agencies and organizations hundreds of hours, and tens of thousands of dollars per project.
Looking for the best premium Drupal themes?
That’s where we come in. Dripyard was founded by Drupal core maintainers and seasoned developers who have worked on Drupal’s theming layer itself. We know the pain points, and we’ve solved them.
Our first set of premium Drupal themes is launching soon. They’re beautiful, accessible, performance-driven, and built the Drupal way.
Be among the first to experience Drupal themes done right. Join our launch list today!
