CMSQuickStart Drupal Theme Review

Full disclosure: CMS Quick Start provided me with the theme at no charge in exchange for the review. I was not asked to do anything other than write an honest review of their product, and everything below is exactly that, my honest opinion.

Pricing

I like the $100 price point for a theme, but have paid more when I've found something special. CMS Quick Start offers packages with additional features so you can get a theme at $150, or pay more and have access to a Drupal 7 version when it is available (something I haven't seen from other providers).

For the cost, the theme (I chose the CMS Elements theme) included a number of features which make it a great value, which I'll get into below.

Design

Aesthetically, the CMS Quick Start Drupal themes are very nice. They are clean and slick. Each comes with a number of automated color options, which is helpful to match your logo or a color your primary audience finds appealing. Some, like the Elements theme, also come with background options.

Features

One thing I loved was the level of customization that came with the theme. For example, I used the theme on a site which allows reviews of nodes with the Fivestar module. The theme allowed me to easily change many of the references to "comments" to "reviews" for the content type. This helps my users' experience stay consistent.

You can also adjust column widths, the theme background, colors, whether or not author name is displayed for posts (per content type), fonts, breadcrumbs, how search results are displayed, and more from the theme's configure page.

The theme includes an install package which sets up all the modules and settings to get everything working immediately. I chose not to do use this because I added the theme to a live site. This meant some additional work (an hour or two) to get it up and running, but the end result was worth the effort.

Support

I did run into an issue at this point which required support assistance. The CMS Quick Start site contains a backend which tracks your support requests, and submitting a ticket was simple.

The issue I ran into had to do with the theme's styling of the dynamic display block -- it was not appearing as it should on my site (additional white space surrounding the block). I submitted a request at 11pm on 12/23 and received the necessary code to fix it in 2 hours (no, I do not intentionally pick holidays to submit support requests). While I received the fix, it's only fair to state the error was actually my own. Since I set up the site manually, and had never used the dynamic display module before, the first display I made incorrectly, and so I made another. The theme was set to theme the first dynamic block, not the second.

Back to Features

As I've stated in other reviews, multiple regions to place blocks is a pretty important feature for me. The CMS Elements theme comes through with plenty of them. There's multiple regions above and below the content, some which span across the sidebars and others that do not, along with a clever setup of footer regions which automatically displays blocks horizontally.

It's also cool to learn a little something new when trying out a theme. The Elements theme has a login link only visible to anonymous users, and another "my account" link only visible to those authenticated, all controlled by the "Role specific visibility settings" in the blocks. I had never thought of doing it that way.

My only criticism would be that I would like more typography options for paragraph classes like download, alert, note, etc. These can add nice visual cues to users, calling their attention to important information on a page.

Due to the superior designs, the massive list of features, and pricing options, I feel that CMS Quick Start is the class of the premium Drupal theme providers.

Grade: A+