- Kind
- Themes
- Status
- Drupal 7 and 8 era, reference only
About Free Drupal Themes
Between 2012 and 2017 WeebPal designed and released a collection of free Drupal themes, covering business, portfolio, blog, magazine, e-commerce and corporate sites. Some are published as projects on Drupal.org under the WeebPal account, including Zircon, the theme the collection is still best known for. They are Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 era work: useful as reference and as a base to sub-theme from, not as supported themes for a new Drupal 10 or 11 build.
Features
- Released 2012 to 2017
- Published on Drupal.org and weebpal.com
- Business, portfolio, blog, e-commerce
- Drupal 7 and 8 era
- Drupal coding standards
What is actually in the collection?
Between 2012 and 2017 WeebPal designed and released free Drupal themes covering business and corporate sites, portfolios, blogs, magazines, e-commerce storefronts and forums. Some went out as full projects on Drupal.org under the WeebPal account, the rest as downloads from weebpal.com.
The ones published on Drupal.org can still be inspected today. They include Zircon, Zircon We, Business We, Magazine We, Marketplace We, Real Estate We, Personal Blog, Onepage We, Forum Plus, and the WeebPal Backend Theme, which is an administration theme rather than a front-end one.
Which of these did people actually use?
Zircon, by a wide margin. It was created on Drupal.org on 20 March 2012, the first thing WeebPal published to the community, and Drupal.org's own usage statistics still report 787 sites running it. It was also published as the first free Drupal 8 theme on Drupal.org, which is where most of its early attention came from.
Zircon has since outgrown us, in the way contributed code is supposed to: the project lists several maintainers, most of whom have never worked here, and its most recent release activity dates from January 2022. We do not quote download figures for the rest of the collection, because Drupal.org does not publish usage data for most of those projects and we have no independent count to offer instead.
Can you still run these on Drupal 10 or 11?
Mostly no, and it is worth being blunt about it rather than letting you find out after the install. Zircon's newest packaged release is 8.x-1.0-rc1, from November 2015. There are development branches touching Drupal 9 and Drupal 10, but a development branch is not a supported release and should not be treated as one. Zircon We, the Drupal 8 successor, is flagged on Drupal.org as unsupported and obsolete, and is explicitly outside the security advisory policy.
So treat the collection as reference material (markup patterns, region layouts, a base to sub-theme from) rather than as something to install on a site you intend to keep running. If you are on one of these themes on a live site today, the work in front of you is a Drupal migration, and in practice the theme layer gets rebuilt rather than carried across.
What was built into them?
More than the visual design, which is the part that dates fastest. Garnet was built on Bootstrap with a flat design, preset colour schemes and several selectable layouts. Business, released on 29 April 2014, shipped preset colour schemes and the content types a company site actually needs, such as an about page and a structured services page, rather than leaving them to be modelled from scratch. Sport Magazine was the media-heavy end of the range, laid out for news, galleries and video.
The piece with the longest life is the menu builder. TB Mega Menu, bundled with those themes, became WE Mega Menu, which we still maintain on Drupal.org and still use on client work today.
Why did the theme releases stop?
What can be said from the record: the releases cluster in 2012 to 2017, and every project WeebPal is now credited with on Drupal.org is a module rather than a theme. Drupal's front-end layer also changed underneath the collection in that period, from PHPTemplate to Twig and then towards component-based theming, which makes a 2014 theme a poor starting point for a 2026 build whatever its quality at the time.
What should you use for a new build?
For a new Drupal 11 site, a current base theme plus a design system built for the project. That is Drupal development work, and the theme layer is part of the handover like everything else. If what you want is a running platform rather than a blank site, the platforms we maintain are the shorter route, and the portfolio shows what has been delivered from them.
Further reading
Still running one of these themes?
Moving a site off a Drupal 7 or 8 theme is migration work, and the theme layer is usually rebuilt. Tell us what the site runs today.