With the removal of stable9 from Drupal Core 12, this theme is no longer relevant and can no longer be supported. Reported usage of this theme has never exceeded 10 sites, and those were probably all in our own local development environments.
History
The HFC Base theme (originally HFCCBase) was a starter theme originally derived from the Drupal 5 version Basic theme by Raincity Studios. Since that time, these two themes diverged widely.
This theme was intended to be a base theme for multiple projects. Styles placed in this theme should not be opinionated, and should be applicable for most cases on any site. These global definitions can be overridden by site themes or for specific uses by using more precise selectors.
The HFC Base theme was starting point for Drupal theme work at Henry Ford College and for other sites I've built outside of HFC. The goal of this theme was to extend the stable9 them to provide just enough stable, reusable components to provide a starting point for new design work. Many of the changes provided by the current version of this theme were copied or derived from classy.
When creating a sub-theme, themers will generally want to copy some of the CSS files and overwrite them completely, adding new CSS files in the sub-theme to style the headers, footers and menus, etc.
6.x-1.x Branch
This branch was basically the Drupal 6 derivative of my original theme, and didn't have too many fundamental changes to its structure over the years. I have several production sites running with this theme as its base.
6.x-2.x Branch
This version was a major overhaul. I cleaned up a lot of cruft without worrying about supporting existing sites, and changed the templates over to a responsive, mobile-first layout using the Gridless HTML5 and CSS3 boilerplate.
7.x-1.x Branch
This was a straight port from the 6.x-2.x branch, but I ripped out a lot of stuff because much of what the old theme did was provided by 7.x Core. The biggest thing this missing was the username formatting that was based on Drupal 6 core Profile module.
1.4.x Branch
The 1.4.x branch for Drupal ^10 || ^11 was marginally maintained as relevant changes were made to HFC's in-house base theme. This release was built on stable9 and was intended to be a replacement option for classy with some added features.
