Business

Business was the first theme I released under the Devsaran banner, in January 2012, and it is still the most widely installed thing I have ever written. It was built for the least glamorous job on the web: a small or medium company that needs a credible site this week, with a slideshow on the front page and somewhere sensible to put a phone number.

It deliberately depends on no base theme. Drupal 7 core shipped Bartik and Seven with assumptions baked into their markup, and inheriting from either turned every customisation into a fight with an override. So Business ships its own templates and its own CSS from the ground up — twelve block regions, a custom front page using four of them, a sidebar configurable to the left or the right, and Color module integration so a site owner could recolour the whole thing without opening a stylesheet. The Drupal 7 build is fixed at 920px, which is what a modern layout meant in early 2012; the later Drupal 8 work made it responsive.

Twelve releases went out over twenty months, and most of them were driven by issue-queue reports rather than by anything I had planned. That is the part that shaped how I work now. Once a few hundred sites are running your code you stop being the author and become the maintainer, and every decision gets measured by what it costs the people who already installed it — which is the same calculation a multi-tenant platform forces on you a decade later, at a much larger blast radius.

Business has also outlived my involvement. Other maintainers carried it onto Drupal 8, 9 and 10, and drupal.org still reports installs on those branches alongside the Drupal 7 one. A theme that keeps moving after its original author stops touching it is the clearest evidence I have that releasing it was worth the effort.