Multipurpose Theme

Multipurpose is the last theme I published. It went out in September 2014 and never had a second release, which makes it a fair marker for where the Drupal theming chapter of my work ends and the application work begins.

The design vocabulary is the one Venture and Corporate Agency use: flat header, flat navigation, flat buttons, and a layout that leans on whitespace rather than chrome. Twelve block regions, a one- or two-column layout, multi-level drop-down menus that work with Drupal's multilingual menu handling, and a FlexSlider front page. Like the other themes from that year it expects jQuery Update configured to 1.8.

The name is the honest one for what it is. Multipurpose does not have a target audience so much as an absence of one — it was built to be the theme you reach for when the site does not fit a category, which is a real need and also the reason it has no strong point of view. Nearly eight hundred sites still report running it, and I suspect most of them chose it for exactly that reason.

What I took from publishing twenty-odd of these is that generality is a design choice with a price, not a free upgrade. A theme that suits every site suits none of them especially well. The same argument, scaled up and with money attached, is the one I now have about platform verticals: a core general enough to host anything is only worth having if adding a specific vertical stays cheap.