Drupal Theme Review – CMS Grunge

The market for premium Drupal themes is just starting to get to the stage where it may begin to match that of Joomla and WordPress. Drupal has been lacking in the themes department for quite some time and we're always excited to see new themes and theme clubs starting up. One such club is CMS Quickstart which specializes in beautiful Drupal themes. Today we're going to examine one of their offerings, CMS Grunge.

CMS Grunge is a slick looking theme that offers 4 color settings and 3 different backgrounds. By default, it looks like this:

Using a combination of striking colors and eye catching textures, this excellent theme transforms Drupal into a grungy, edgy looking blog/cms.

It comes with a huge number of predefined regions where content and blocks can be placed allowing for maximum flexibility:

Configuration of the theme is easy thanks to a very indepth theme configuration page in the backend:

Exploring each of these sections, we start with the layout. These fields allow you to fully adjust the colors, background and widths of all columns within the theme so that you can adapt this to whatever look you may wish. Of course, you are not limited to the existing colors and backgrounds, a few changes to the CSS files and you have your own unique design as well.

The next section allows for font configuration. You can easily choose from preset font styles or create your own in the custom field:

Now you are able to move to the next section, Search Results. This section lets you configure what information you want to show in the search results.

Following this is the node display settings. This section has so many options, there would be too many screenshots to show them all so we'll list what you can do here below:

• You can adjust whether the author and date is shown for each content type.
• Read more links can be customized per content type.
• Comment links can be reworded and customized per content type.
• You can customize how taxonomy terms are shown.
• Block editing can be enabled or disabled so that when you hover over a block, edit options appear.
• Breadcrumbs can be customized.

To say the least, this is a very solid and easily customizable theme. The CMS Quickstart team have done an excellent job of making what normally is a bit of a daunting task, much easier than expected. I applaud them for their customization options, they are outstanding.

CMS Grunge isn't their only theme so if you are looking for something different, check them out using any of the links below.

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