Dripyard: The Next Generation of Premium Drupal Themes for Production-Ready Sites

Getting a Drupal install to look good out of the box is an age-old problem. You could always build something impressive, but only if you knew what you were doing plus 100-200 hours of dev time. With the advent of DrupalCMS we got a few nice themes out the box to play with. I felt like we were close, but not quite there in terms of the quality Drupal represents.

Enter Mike Herchel and Andy Giles. These two have brought 25+ years of core Drupal expertise and bundled them up in purchasable themes. And these themes are nice. They have three at the moment for different use cases but are building constantly and they are production ready to drag and drop your latest content and have it not only work but look extremely professional with a high level of finish.

TL;DR

Dripyard offers premium Drupal themes that are Canvas-ready, built with pure CSS (no frameworks), WCAG 2.2 AA accessible, and come with 50+ production-ready components. No base theme means no bloat - just lightning-fast, malleable code you actually control.

Why Traditional Drupal Themes Fall Short

Ever inherited a Drupal project with a theme built on Bootstrap or Foundation? You know the pain. Megabytes of CSS you don't need. JavaScript conflicts. Framework version lock-in. And when you need to customise something, you're fighting the framework instead of building your site.

Base themes in Drupal are incredibly useful, but they often add bloat to the finished sub-theme when care isn't taken to remove unnecessary CSS files - or files that are 5% used and 95% overridden.

The promise was always "use this framework, move faster." The reality? Technical debt from day one.

The No Third Party Base Theme

Dripyard creates its base theme from scratch meaning no third party base theme, no CSS frameworks, no JavaScript frameworks.

That sounds scary to some developers. "Where's my Bootstrap grid? Where's my utility classes?" But once you work with Dripyard's approach, you realise what you've been missing: actual control over your code.

Dripyard themes use modern componentized CSS with:

Container queries - components that respond to their container, not the viewport
Native CSS nesting - the syntax you've been using in SASS, now native
No framework dependencies - zero bloat, zero version conflicts

A theme based on Drupal core will probably be lighter than one based on a contrib base theme that loads a lot of default CSS and JavaScript libraries out-of-the-box. Dripyard takes this philosophy to its logical conclusion.

Canvas: The new default

Drupal Canvas (formerly Experience Builder) launched in December 2025 as Drupal's answer to modern page building. It's the centrepiece of Drupal CMS 2.0, and Dripyard themes are built specifically to leverage it. I've covered Canvas extensively in my 5 tips and tricks guide and building a hero component tutorial.

Canvas enables site builders without Drupal experience to theme and build entire websites using only their browser - no code beyond basic JSX and CSS. It's drag-and-drop, component-based, and finally competitive with the proprietary alternatives.

What makes Dripyard themes special for Canvas:

Single Directory Components (SDC) - the modern architecture Canvas depends on
Zero non-core dependencies - recipes work out of the box
Seamless Layout Builder integration - use Canvas or traditional Layout Builder, your choice
Pre-built component library - 50+ components ready for the Canvas visual editor

Mike Herchel has contributed heavily to Drupal core's Single Directory Components initiative. Dripyard themes are Canvas-compatible and built by someone shaping Canvas itself.

Dripyard Canvas demo homepage A production-ready homepage built with Dripyard and Canvas - hero sections, service cards, all drag-and-drop

Three Themes

Dripyard currently offers three premium themes, each with distinct character but sharing the Dripyard Base theme:

Meridian

Designed to be flexible, adaptable, and beautiful. Meridian works for agencies, startups, and organisations that need a theme they can shape into anything. It's the Swiss Army knife.

Neonbyte

Clean and minimalistic. Neonbyte strips away distraction to let your content shine. Perfect for products, portfolios, and anyone who believes less is more.

Great Lakes

Balancing beauty with integrity. Great Lakes emphasises accessible, performant design without sacrificing aesthetics. Named after Michigan's Great Lakes (Mike's based in Florida, but appreciates good water).

All three share core features:

WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility - not an afterthought, built in from the start
Full RTL support - right-to-left languages work out of the box
Multilingual ready - language switcher components included
Mega-menu capable - complex navigation without custom development
Image and font preloading - performance optimisation baked in
Search API compatible - works with Drupal's search ecosystem

Building Blocks

Most themes are meant to be modified. They're designed to be configured through admin UIs, maybe tweaked with CSS overrides, but fundamentally static.

Dripyard themes are different and play as the building blocks for other themes.

The pure CSS approach means:

Read the code, understand the code
Override what you need without fighting a framework
Extend components without breaking dependencies
Build something genuinely custom without starting from scratch

This is lovely when actually trying to customise. Got a client with specific accessibility requirements beyond WCAG 2.2? The semantic markup, keyboard navigation, and ARIA patterns are all there - visible, editable, yours. Need a component that doesn't exist? The existing 50+ components serve as patterns for building your own.

Dripyard component library in Canvas The Dripyard component library - organised categories from basic elements to cards, forms, and general components

This is what "malleable" actually means—it's code designed to be shaped.

Drupal in Enterprise

Drupal maintains about 1.2% of the global CMS market, but that number is deceptive. Drupal accounts for 7.5% of the top 1,000 websites ranked by traffic.

The pattern is clear: when organisations need security, scalability, and complex content workflows, they choose Drupal. Government agencies, large corporations, universities - the sites where downtime costs real money.

These organisations don't want theme frameworks that might conflict with security patches. They want:

Auditable code - readable CSS without framework abstractions
No vendor lock-in - pure CSS means no framework EOL surprises
Performance by default - no unnecessary JavaScript runtime
Accessibility compliance - WCAG 2.2 AA isn't optional for government

Dripyard delivers exactly this. Premium quality without premium complexity.

Getting Started with Dripyard

The onboarding experience reflects the product philosophy: straightforward, no bloat.

Purchase and download - no license keys to manage, fully self-contained
Install via Composer - standard Drupal workflow
Enable Canvas - optional but recommended for the full experience
Start building - 50+ components ready immediately

Dripyard includes two months of complimentary support via Slack or contact form. Need custom modifications? Premium customisation services are available.

The themes come with recipes for block types and layouts using no non-core dependencies. This means your recipes work on any Drupal 11 installation without module conflicts.

Dripyard recipe application settings One-click recipes for blocks, nodes, Layout Builder pages, and Canvas demos - instant site scaffolding

Instant Theme Creation with Canvas

Here's where it gets exciting. Canvas plus Dripyard means you can create production-ready pages in minutes:

Open the Canvas editor
Drag Dripyard components onto the page
Configure properties in the visual panel
Preview and publish

No code required for content editors. Full code control for developers when they need it.

Canvas's code components feature lets you build custom React components right in the browser. Need something Dripyard doesn't include? Build it yourself without leaving the Canvas interface. The existing Dripyard components serve as patterns for your own. And if you're interested in AI-assisted page building, check out my post on AI-native page building with Canvas.

This is what "instant theme creation" actually looks like: not a theme generator that spits out half-baked code, but a production-ready system that's immediately useful and infinitely extensible.

Conclusion

Dripyard represents what Drupal theming should have been all along:

Pure CSS - no framework dependencies, no bloat
Canvas-ready - built for Drupal's next-generation page builder
No base theme - complete control, complete clarity
Production-ready - 50+ components, WCAG 2.2 AA, multilingual, RTL
Built by expertise - from Drupal's core theme maintainer

For agencies building client sites, Dripyard is a foundation you can actually extend. For enterprise organisations, it's auditable code that meets compliance requirements. For anyone tired of fighting frameworks, it's a breath of fresh air.

I'm putting my money where my mouth is - I'm planning to rebuild my own agency site with NeonByte. At around $600 USD, it's not cheap, but it's a fraction of what you'd pay a full dev team to build something comparable from scratch. That's the value proposition here: production-ready quality without the production-ready price tag.

The next generation of Drupal themes isn't about more features or more frameworks. It's about better code, done right, from someone who actually knows what that means.

Check out Dripyard and see what production-ready Drupal theming looks like.

Dripyard: The Next Generation of Drupal Themes for Production-Ready Sites

Dripyard: The Next Generation of Premium Drupal Themes for Production-Ready Sites

TL;DR

Why Traditional Drupal Themes Fall Short

The No Third Party Base Theme

Canvas: The new default