All beautiful websites have one thing in common — a good theme. It should be not only beautiful but also mobile responsive, accessible, and ready to support modern website functionality.

This is all true of Olivero — the future main front-end theme for Drupal 9. And this future is just around the corner because Drupal 9 is coming! With it is coming the era of beautiful websites.

Why is a website theme important?

A website theme defines what the site looks like to visitors, which includes layout, styles, color schemes, typography, buttons, and much more. Beautiful themes make beautiful websites, creating visual appeal and your brand’s identity. But this is not all.

The theme’s responsibility goes beyond being beautiful. It can also greatly contribute to the smooth user’s interaction with the website, including on various mobile devices. So if beautiful website design goes hand-in-hand with the best usability practices, this eventually translates into more conversions.

The new Olivero theme in Drupal 9

The new theme’s official overviews say “Drupal 9: The Most Beautiful CMS Ever!” And you immediately know it’s true when you see Olivero.

Olivero is a beautiful implementation of the community’s idea to create a new default front-end theme. The current default theme, Bartik, is ten years old already and was initially created for D7.

Bartik has served us as an amazing and very adaptable theme. In addition, it is mobile responsive out-of-the-box to meet D8’s mobile-first philosophy. However, Bartik’s design looks a bit outdated. So Drupal needed a new main front-end theme that would better showcase Drupal’s strength.

Olivero is expected to come in Drupal 9.1. The community keeps working on it, and anyone who wants to contribute to it is welcome.

Theme named in honor of Rachel Olivero

There is a nice tradition in Drupal to name main themes after outstanding programmers. For example, Bartik got its name after Jean Bartik who was among the original ENIAC computer creators.

The tradition goes on with Olivero — it is named after a female programmer Rachel Olivero who was an outstanding advocate of website accessibility. Sadly, Rachel passed away in 2019. To honor her, the community kept her beautiful name alive in a beautiful theme. Patient, generous, and inclusive — these were Rachel Olivero’s qualities that they wanted the theme to embody.

Key features of Olivero theme in Drupal 9

Beautiful web design, simplicity with no clutter, a professional look, accessibility, flexibility in options, responsiveness on mobile devices — the list of its virtues could go on. Let’s outline at least a few of its numerous features for websites.

WCAG AA compliance

One of the top priorities for the theme’s creators was to make Olivero compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), so they worked with website accessibility experts. All users, including those with various impairments, should find it easy to use websites with Olivero.

Support for the latest Drupal functionality

The Olivero creators have prioritized making it supportive of the recent Drupal features for websites such as Layout Builder, media embeds, second-level navigation, and more.

A modern and bright color palette

Websites will look beautiful with Olivero’s color scheme, with a base color of bright blue. In addition to being attractive, it supports Drupal’s branding. Combinations of darker and lighter colors help provide website accessibility.

Simple but modern forms and buttons

Forms and buttons in Olivero are user-friendly, recognizable, and accessible. Forms have a left color bar, and their labels are placed above the fields to meet website accessibility requirements. Buttons are presented in two types: primary and secondary.

A convenient sidebar region

Olivero features a beautiful sidebar to the right of the website’s main content area that allows you, for example, to add related content. The region proportions allow the content area to look more prominent, while the sidebar gives it good support.

Flexible header and navigation options

Navigation options can accommodate any website’s needs. The header is able to collapse into a hamburger-button menu when scrolling, which allows the menu to be accessible on long pages. The secondary dropdown menus are also supported by Olivero.

RTL (right-to-left) text direction support

Drupal 8 has already raised the bar of multilingual support very high. See why Drupal 8 is the best choice for multilingual websites, including those with RTL languages. It will be even better with the new theme in Drupal 9 — just take a look at the beautiful RTL implementation.

Time for beautiful websites and other Drupal 9’s benefits!

It looks like Olivero is one of the beautiful answers to the question of what’s new in Drupal 9, coming in June 2020!

As a web agency that creates beautiful websites with great functionality and optimizes existing ones, we would like to offer you our assistance in:

getting ready for Drupal 9, which involves a good clean-up from deprecated code

moving your website to Drupal that becomes “The Most Beautiful CMS Ever!” (and it’s just a tiny part of Drupal’s strength)

creating a custom theme, or otherwise improving your website’s design to make it more beautiful, user-friendly, and accessible

Drop a line to our Drupal development team!