Best Responsive

Best Responsive is the trimmed-down member of the responsive group. Businesses, portfolios, agencies and blogs all get the same shape: a one- or two-column layout, twelve block regions, a captioned FlexSlider front page, social links, and very little else. The design brief was to remove rather than to add.

That restraint is the point. Every decorative flourish in a Drupal 7 theme costs an image request, a rule in a stylesheet that someone will eventually need to override, and a piece of markup that has to survive being filled with content nobody anticipated. Themes that looked impressive in a screenshot and collapsed under a real client's three-line page title were common in that era; the way to avoid it is to design for the ugly case first.

Three releases across ten months. The low release count reflects a genuinely small surface area — there was less in it to go wrong, and the issue queue stayed correspondingly quiet. Over six hundred sites still report running it, which for a theme that was deliberately unambitious is a reasonable result.

The habit it built is one I still apply to product decisions: the feature you did not ship is the only one guaranteed not to break, and on a platform serving many tenants at once, "less to configure" and "less to support" are the same sentence.