Open Source
25 Drupal themes. 15 years of maintenance.
Free, GPL-licensed Drupal themes published under the Devsaran name and maintained on drupal.org/u/devsaran. This is a decade-old chapter, kept here because the themes are still installed and still linked to — not because it is what I do now.
- Free Drupal themes
- 25
- Sites reporting, August 2026
- 13,000+
- On drupal.org
- 15 yrs
Three years of shipping code strangers would run
The first release went out in October 2011 and the last theme in September 2014 — twenty-five free, GPL-licensed Drupal 7 themes published under the Devsaran name, most of them written in evenings alongside client work.
What that taught was not the code. It was what happens afterwards: the issue queue, the person on Drupal 6 who needs a backport, the person whose site broke because you renamed something in a point release. Once a few hundred sites are running your work you stop being the author and become the maintainer, and every decision gets measured by what it costs the people who already installed it.
The themes were a bigger undertaking than they look. A Drupal 7 theme in 2012 was not a stylesheet. It was a full set of PHP templates, a preprocess layer, a region map, a Color-module integration, and CSS that had to survive Internet Explorer 7 — because clients still had it — while also looking deliberate on an iPad. Most of these themes inherit from no core base theme at all, because Bartik and Seven came with markup assumptions that turned every customisation into an argument with an override. Building from nothing was more work up front and far less work for everyone who installed it.
You can watch the industry change across the release dates. The themes from early 2012 are fixed-width: 900px, 920px, 960px, 978px, 980px, 1000px — every one of them an answer to the same arithmetic about a 1024px screen and a scrollbar. By mid-2012 responsive layouts arrive and stop being a retrofit. By the end of 2013 the gradients and bevels are gone and flat design has taken over. Three years of front-end history, legible in a list of release notes.
What it still gives the platform work
The through-line from a free Drupal theme to a multi-tenant commerce platform is not the technology — none of that PHP survives — it is the constraint. When strangers run your code you cannot fix a mistake by editing production. You ship a version, they choose whether to take it, and every decision you make is paid for by people you will never meet. That is the same discipline a platform serving many brands at once demands, with more money attached and a much larger blast radius.
Three specific habits came out of it. The first is that variation belongs in configuration, not in a fork: I released one theme as a separate project when it should have been a colour scheme inside an existing one, and paid for it in duplicated fixes for years — which is precisely the failure a white-label platform exists to prevent. The second is that every configurable thing you expose is a promise you have to keep through every future release, so extensibility is a liability you take on deliberately rather than a free upgrade. The third is that integrations belong behind an interface: two competing Indian payment processors, each with its own idea of what a completed transaction looks like, is the same argument that now keeps dozens of payment methods behind one internal abstraction in the platforms I build at Devkart Technologies.
A note on the numbers, because they deserve one. The install figures on the project pages here are drupal.org's own current reporting — the sites that still phone home through the update system — not lifetime downloads. Drupal 7 reached end of life in January 2025, so those counts describe what is still running a decade after the last release, rather than everything that was ever installed. They are quoted exactly as drupal.org states them, and nowhere on this page are they estimated.
One project needs flagging rather than featuring. Nexus Theme now sits in drupal.org's Unsupported Projects queue after a security issue went unfixed, and its releases are no longer recommended. It is listed below with the rest, because leaving it out would be tidier and less honest.
Three worth reading about
The two most-installed themes, and the one that taught me the most by being a mistake.
Business
The first theme, January 2012 — published while I was doing Drupal work at SourceN.
The first theme I published and still the most installed — a base-theme-free corporate layout with twelve regions and Color-module support.
Read about BusinessProfessional Theme
Mid-2012 — the point where responsive stopped being a retrofit and became the starting assumption.
A responsive corporate theme with one-, two- and three-column layouts, FlexSlider, and an explicit run at WCAG compliance.
Read about ProfessionalImpact Theme
May 2013 — a mid-run variant, and the decision I would reverse if I could.
A dark restyle of Responsive Blog, released as its own project — and the clearest mistake in this catalogue.
Read about ImpactEvery theme on the profile
Drupal 7-era themes, all GPL-2.0-or-later. Titles that link internally have a page here; the rest go straight to drupal.org, where the downloads and release history live.
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Venture Theme
A flat-design responsive business theme from 2014 — two releases in a single month, and one of the most adopted themes in the set.
1,370 installs 2 releases
drupal.org -
Multipurpose Theme
The last theme I published, in September 2014 — flat, responsive, multilingual menus, and exactly one release.
791 installs 1 releases
drupal.org -
Premium Responsive
Four breakpoint layouts, eleven regions and two Color-module schemes — the first theme where responsive was the premise, not a patch.
736 installs 8 releases
drupal.org -
Responsive Blog
A responsive blog and magazine theme with light and dark schemes — and the base another theme in this list was forked from.
621 installs 8 releases
drupal.org -
Best Responsive
A lightweight responsive business and portfolio theme — minimal markup, twelve regions, captioned FlexSlider.
615 installs 3 releases
drupal.org -
Responsive Business
A mobile-first business and portfolio theme with an extended four-block footer and a captioned slideshow.
323 installs 3 releases
drupal.org -
Simple Corporate
Sixteen regions, eight of them in the footer, and the longest release span of any theme in the set — two years.
307 installs 8 releases
drupal.org -
Dark Elegant
A dark corporate and portfolio theme with a customisable background image, FlexSlider, and IE7 in the test matrix.
269 installs 2 releases
drupal.org -
Blogger theme
A minimal, typography-led responsive theme for writers, freelancers and portfolios.
222 installs 1 releases
drupal.org -
Creative Theme
A clean 978px business and portfolio theme built around a jQuery Cycle slideshow and twelve regions.
218 installs 5 releases
drupal.org -
Fresh Theme
A blog and magazine theme with ten-plus collapsible block regions, maintained across two years.
168 installs 8 releases
drupal.org -
Clean Theme
A minimal 980px theme with Nivo Slider and markup written for source order and heading structure.
160 installs 5 releases
drupal.org -
Corporate Agency
The first of the flat-design themes, from December 2013 — the visual language Venture and Multipurpose then reused.
154 installs 1 releases
drupal.org -
Elegant Theme
A 920px corporate theme with a four-region custom front page, a three-block footer and a scroll-to-top control.
148 installs 4 releases
drupal.org -
Black Premium
An all-black 900px theme built to make photography and video the only thing on the page, with adjustable colour accents.
99 installs 4 releases
drupal.org -
Company Theme
A 940px corporate theme with sixteen block regions and a captioned slideshow, for portfolio and business sites.
78 installs 6 releases
drupal.org -
Beauty Theme
A responsive blog and magazine theme with twelve regions, aimed at news and editorial sites.
68 installs 2 releases
drupal.org -
Premium Corporate
A lightweight 920px business theme with a fully customisable Nivo Slider and a configurable background image.
66 installs 5 releases
drupal.org -
Splendio
A 980px blog and magazine theme with post thumbnails and a configurable mega-footer menu — published the same month as Business.
36 installs 1 releases
drupal.org -
Classic Blog
A minimal 960px blogging theme built on the 960 grid system, with five regions and HTML5 markup.
22 installs 2 releases
drupal.org -
Nexus Theme
A flat responsive theme now held in drupal.org's Unsupported Projects queue after an unfixed security issue; its releases are no longer recommended.
1,917 installs Co-maintained Unsupported
drupal.org -
Mozilla Community Sites
A proposed Drupal theme for Mozilla community sites, created by abhisheknagar and co-maintained.
Co-maintained
drupal.org
Alongside the themes there were sixteen contributed modules — payment gateways, jQuery-plugin wrappers and small integrations, several tied to services that have since shut down. They are listed on the drupal.org profile and are not repeated here; the themes are the part of this work with anything left to say.
Beyond the code
Packt technical reviewer
Technical reviewer of "Instant Premium Drupal Themes" (Packt Publishing) — vetting the book the way the community vetted my themes.
15+ years on drupal.org
Member of the Drupal community since 2010 — every theme and module on this page is still listed on my profile.
GitHub
Side projects and experiments — an Ionic taxi-app starter, a contact manager, a project management app — live at github.com/devsaran.
These days my open-source energy goes into the platforms at Devkart Technologies — see what I'm building now →
Working on a marketplace or ordering platform?
I've spent 14+ years architecting exactly these systems — happy to talk through your platform, your stack, or a partnership.