ThemeSnap Drupal Theme Review

Continuing the original review of premium Drupal themes post, and by request, I've put a small review together of one of ThemeSnap.com's Drupal themes.

My original hesitance to review ThemeSnap was the cost of the themes, however; the cost of the themes have recently been reduced to between $89 and $99 each.

ThemeSnap Review

I chose to purchase the ThemeNews Theme because I felt it would be usable for a new site I was working on. In the end, as I'll show, the theme was not usable for my needs. But it's not all bad.

The front page looks slick, and appears to be great for a magazine, or any content-driven site.

Unfortunately, setting that front page up is (literally) an 18 step process. It was not over complicated, and the instructions were, to their credit, very clear. However, it was quite time-consuming. I would have preferred the sections of the front page which displayed various categories of articles be blocks, I believe that would have been easier. But they are defined by a custom module that comes with the theme.

In general, the theme falls short when it comes to regions. There are actually very few regions defined to utilize blocks. There's a header region, which appears above the navigation (odd choice), the obligatory right sidebar, one region below the main content area, and a footer. While working to make it usable I added regions above the content, along with 3 more horizontal regions just above the footer.

A key to a great Drupal theme is flexibility. Regions being one of the keys to that.

After I had all that set up I started creating content, and ran into another issue.

Certain elements of content are designed to appear in gray blocks. This resulted in odd styling.

For example, here's a screenshot of a page defined by the Faceted Search module:

The gray blocking makes the page ugly, and some elements almost unreadable. It's not something I would want to present to a user.

This also affected nodes. Below is how addresses defined by the Gmaps module appear:

It would look better as plain black text.

Pricing

The new sub-$100 is a key price point, in my opinion. When we're talking about a theme that can be purchased and used by any number of people (making your website less unique in appearance) and often sought after by people like myself who are building businesses with little upfront capital, having an affordable and attractive design is important.

The reduction in cost on ThemeSnap themes brings them in-line with what I budget for a new online business.

Support

There was an issue with the theme which I required support for. The Drupal notifications had not been coded into ThemeNews. This meant that if a user put in the wrong password for their account they would not receive a message detailing the problem, leaving them confused. Or, when setting up a new account, a user would be redirected to the home page without a message telling them to check their email. No error messages were given as a result of this being left out.

What's critical is how a company responds to issues like this. Mistakes can and do happen, so the above did not make me angry, but I wanted to see how ThemeSnap responded.

So, on Thanksgiving day I sent a support request detailing the problem. Thanksgiving evening I received a reply with the fix. Even though I was not expecting a reply that day, and if I hadn't I would have been fine with that (family first), ThemeSnap did provide the fix. Support was fantastic, to say the least.

In the end, I did not want to wrestle with the custom front page, adding regions, and recoding the odd gray blocking. To be fair, none of these may be issues in ThemeSnap's other themes. If you find a theme that works for your site and looks great, I recommend ThemeSnap. Pricing is now feasible, and support will not be a problem.

Grade: B