Elegant Theme

Elegant is a 920px corporate and portfolio theme with twelve block regions, a custom front-page layout using four of them, a Nivo Slider with captions, an extended footer carrying three blocks, and a jQuery scroll-to-top control.

The custom front page is the structural idea worth explaining. Rather than the front page being the same template as every other page with different blocks in it, Elegant gives it a dedicated layout with four regions arranged for the job a company home page actually does: a slideshow, then three parallel slots for services, recent work and a call to action. Drupal 7 made that awkward — you were expected to solve it with Panels or a pile of block visibility rules — so the theme solved it in a template instead.

That is a trade I have made repeatedly since, in both directions. Building the special case into the layout makes the common path easy and the unusual path impossible; leaving it configurable makes everything possible and nothing obvious. For a free theme aimed at people without a site builder on hand, the opinionated version was correct.

Four releases over thirteen months, and roughly 150 sites still reporting. Like Clean, its slideshow dependency is the piece that has aged worst.