A new chapter: Why I started Dripyard Themes

Late last year I was laid off. I could have dusted off my résumé, but instead, I chose to build something that I’ve wanted for years. It's been quite the journey, and I'm nervous as hell, but we’re finally launching!

Introducing Dripyard

I’ve been mulling over creating a company to sell premium themes for Drupal for a year or two. Other companies have sold Drupal themes before, but the quality has been lacking, and Drupal’s technological foundation was also lacking.

Dripyard is all about doing Drupal themes the right way. We're making products that we're proud of, using the latest technologies built on modern Drupal. This wasn't always possible, though. 

Why now?

In ye olden days, Drupal themes had no way of knowing what markup to expect, which makes it next to impossible to create beautiful styles. Commercial theme companies worked around this by shipping modules with their themes that dictated the content model, or locked you into a subpar page building experience.

With the advent of Single Directory Components (SDC), this all changed. Themes can now ship a library of components that can be re-used throughout the site. Between technologies such as SDC, modern CSS, and Drupal’s renewed focus on the mid-market, the time is now.

Right now, you can build a very complex information architecture using Drupal just by clicking around. But, as soon as you want to make it beautiful, it costs so much money. This is our niche: You can either pay a designer & front-end developer well north of $10,000 to make a beautiful, and accessible theme, or you can buy one from us for a fraction of the cost.

This is a capability that other CMS’s (WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, etc) have had for many years. Our hope is that the lower cost of development will increase Drupal’s adoption and help grow the community.

The enormity of the challenge

When I started Dripyard (with my friend and cofounder Andy Giles), I thought we’d be slingin’ themes in a few months. Man, how I wish!

We went through several challenges, each with their own solutions.

• Finding an amazing (and affordable for us) designer was key. Prior to her, we went through several amazing folks, but they just didn’t work out for various reasons.
• Figuring out a component architecture that can scale. More difficult that it sounds, finding the right blend of abstraction is key to creating usable components, helping to enforce accessibility standards (contrast), and providing a great developer experience for both our clients and us
• Testing the components under less-than-ideal circumstances is difficult. For a normal site, you can tell editors where to place components. For themes such as ours (and Olivero), we have absolutely zero control over whether your component gets placed in a sidebar, hero, etc. It needs to adapt to everything without unexpectedly breaking.
• Keeping up with Canvas/XB/DrupalCMS, while still supporting traditional Drupal, is an ongoing challenge (of which there are several open issues). Drupal Canvas (formerly known as Prince Experience Builder) is a rapidly moving project, that we will support out of the gate.
• The amount of miscellaneous Drupal core components that need to be supported is crazy. This includes things like the node preview toolbar, responsive tables, views sticky header, various toolbars, etc etc etc.
• And last but not least was the personal task of supporting myself and my family while I have zero income. I believe in this so much that I took out a line of credit against my house to pay my bills.

The best themes that I’ve ever created

I can say without a doubt that these themes are the best I’ve ever created. They’re beautiful, extremely flexible, hyper-accessibile (when used properly of course), support all the crazy shit that Drupal does, and are future leaning, with testing done on Experience Builder Drupal Canvas and other page builders.

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It’s crazy that you can take one of these themes, and by changing around color schemes, design tokens, and components, make radically different looking websites.

Separating ourselves from the pack

I want to make themes that I’m proud of. I want to look at websites and think to myself, “I did that!”.

To that end, we’re putting in so much effort. We’re doing our themes the right way (I know this sounds super cliche). They’re accessible (WCAG 2.2 AA compliant), super fast, and have no dependencies outside of Drupal core. We’re even shipping built in recipes (installable on the theme settings page!) within our theme that gets you up and running in minutes.

We’re supporting both Drupal CMS and Drupal core, Drupal Canvas, and whatever other page-builder you have (including Paragraphs). Because our architecture is component-driven, all you need to do is map your templates to the appropriate SDCs.

No lie, these themes easily have more than a thousand hours into them.

What’s next?

Well, we launched our website over the weekend (go check it out)! We’re still working on the e-commerce portion, and we’re in the process of actually legalizing our business so we can accept payment.

We’re starting to market ourselves (email lists, social media, podcasts, etc).

We’re planning on launching our themes Tuesday, September 30th at 11am ET, with a live webinar (you can register here). Both Andy and I are super excited.

We’re just getting started!

The two themes that we’re launching with are just the beginning. Now that we have a robust component library combined with a battle-tested design system, we’re planning on releasing new themes much more rapidly.

And Drupal is just getting started, too! Drupal Canvas is slated to become stable in October, which will pair with the release of Drupal CMS 2.0. This promises to be a revolution in site-building and page-building, which is something Drupal has needed for many years.

I also want to say thank you to my friends in the Drupal community who helped, and cheerleaded for us along the way. Thank you all!

Want to learn more?

Well obviously, check out Dripyard.com if you have not yet been there. I’ve written a couple blogs, and Andy has one ready to be published later this week.

Our launch webinar is scheduled for 11am ET / 5pm CET / 8:30pm IST on September 30th. We’ll be going over a lot of content there.

We have social media on BlueSky, Mastodon, LinkedIn and Twitter (along with an RSS feed). And of course, we have an email mailing list! Join up at https://dripyard.com/mailing-list for news, discount codes and more!.

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