forDrupal's Platino Drupal Theme Review

forDrupal.com's Platino theme is designed for social websites, its demo displaying it incorporated with the Flag module, and some custom PHP work to pull that information into user profiles, and displays on nodes.

This is both the good and the bad of the theme (read Features section for more).

Pricing

As far as premium, but not custom, themes go, Platino is costly at $359. It's competitors often come in around $100, so why pay a premium? The Platino theme is nice, well thought out, and comes with multiple opportunities to customize in the Configurations section. While I have my gripes with the theme, its feature set is great, design nice and support is great. I do not have a problem recommending it to someone even with the high price tag. If you have the cash, and the theme fits your site, go for it.

Design

Overall the design is unique and solid. When I launched the site I changed the background color, the green gradient didn't look right behind the blue and gray elements. I also found the green didn't flow well behind content. I changed it to a very light gray gradient, and I feel it look better. The same is true for the dark gray block backgrounds at the top and bottom. I completely removed the background from the top region, which improved the look, but kept the bottom.

One element of the design I feel could have been better thought out is logo placement. On Platino, it makes the most sense to place your logo to the left of the menu (above the search box). The problem comes when you have a tall, or particularly wide, logo. The word "Platino" fits nicely in the space, but if you choose to place your domain name (which is longer than a half-dozen or so characters), or if your logo is taller than it is wide, it just won't work in the spot. You're then forced to find an alternative, none of which makes much sense (above content or in a space for an advertisement, for example).

I also don't like the amount of space placed around the content of blocks in the right sidebar. This white space chews up valuable screen real estate. If you place an image ad (as an example, applies to content as well) of any substantial size, you have to figure in the large amount of padding around it, or your main content appears to have little room, and blocks below it may get pushed below the fold.

Full size screenshot of block padding:

The theme does contain nice typography options for lists, alerts, blockquotes, pre tags, etc.

Features

As stated in my intro, some of the features on display in the demo are also the theme's downside. This is because some of it is custom PHP code. In order to replicate functionality of the demo you need to utilize the install profile on your local machine and copy the code (and module settings) to your live site. This isn't a deal-breaker, but it's not always clear in the demo (prior to purchase) what exactly is built into the theme, what's a module, and what is custom PHP in conjunction with a module. For example, the login block to the right of the search bar is custom PHP. There's also PHP for the display of blocks (which users have flagged a node, for example) on nodes. If you're like me and PHP is not your forte, it can be frustrating to find out there's a lot more work ahead of you than you expected.

There are 22 regions (not including the sidebar) to place blocks. If you've read any of my past reviews, you know I love having many regions (which occupy different areas) available. This can really help customize the look of a site, and offer opportunities to reach users in different ways. Platino presents plenty of options for blocks. Some of these are built with ads in mind, which I appreciate. Many developers creating great content sites need a spot for ads.

Configurations are also plentiful. They include: breadcrumb settings; display of author and/or date per content type; taxonomy display (per content type, per vocabulary); "Read More" settings (text display); comment settings (text use to identify comments, entice users to comment, also possible per content type); and search results settings which allow you to select which parts of a node (snippet, content type, comments, etc) appear in search results.

Support

I had a couple of opportunities to contact forDrupal support. The problems generally were not bugs with the theme, but displayed my weak PHP knowledge. Support response was quick and friendly. I do not expect forDrupal customers will have problems here.

Grade B+
What would increase the already good grade? 1) Lower cost. 2) Details on steps to recreate demo. 3) Improved logo placement options. 4) Improvements to spacing within blocks.

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