INSTALL file

+1 from me. I spent some time looking around for any kind of instructions on installation until I found your short but essential instructions. Thanks.

Please excuse me if I'm posting this in completely the wrong place but I'd just like to mirror Andrew's comments form above. I've also spent ages looking for ages looking for info on installing Zengine and Zengine based themes. The little nugget "INSTALL_1.patch" set me in the right direction.

I have a few questions though:

In Drupal 5 should the Zengine engine be placed in a sites/all/themes/engines directory or in the /templates/engines directory? I tried both and they both seem to work so I'm leaving it in sites/all/themes/engines - no idea if this is the right thing to do. The zen_basic theme install file says to place it in themes/engines but has a question in it as to whether it should be in the sites directory... seems to be confusion on this.

I think I know the answer to this one but it caused me some head scratching as a drupal noob:
Should new Zengine based themes be placed in a subdirectory of the original Zen theme (like zen-fixed) or be placed at the same level as any other theme i.e. sites/all/themes? I'm putting it my new custom theme directly in sites/all/themes.

With the Zengine being used (and talked about so much) on lullabot I think lots of people (including me!) want to use it but there is a dearth of information on how to install it and base new themes on it. Maybe a lullabot article is called for... :o)

It should go into the sites/all/themes/engines directory. This is because you don't want to touch the Drupal install tree in order to make it easy to drop in a newer version of Drupal. All your contrib themes and modules should either go into sites/all or sites/default (or sites/mysite.com for multi-site installations).
Have a look at the zenzen theme for a good example of a zengine based theme. (There is also zenbasic, but it has an extra empty styles.css which I don't think is necessary. There are some helpful notes in with this theme.)
If you are making a zengine based theme for a specific site, it should go into sites/default/themes and you should modify the name and contents of zenzen.info replacing zenzen with your new name. That is all you have to do.

Thanks folks. INSTALL and README committed to 5-dev. http://drupal.org/cvs?commit=79630