Base CSS and tpl files don't get loaded (sub-theme with page.tpl.php)

I believe that the problem is that as soon as you create a page.tpl.php file, PHPTemplate sees this as a new theme. This is the reason that I started the Zengine theme engine and also the reason that Drupal 6 now uses .info files.

If you're wanting to create a "sub" theme with complete page templates, you should probably check out Zengine... perhaps you can help me document it! ;-)

i am having the same trouble. is there any way to hide the .tpl.php files from the engine?

alternatively, is their a straightfoward conversion process between zen and zengine?

I also have seen this issue. My workaround is to either:

1a. rename the page.tpl.php to something else

or

1b. delete the page.tpl.php

2. Navigate back into the Themes admin page

3. Put back/rename the page.tpl.php.

Annoying, but solvable for the time being. Is there a smooth transition to Zengine? I know that zen has apparently split into 3 projects and I would like to go with something that is stable from a development standpoint.

I'm actually using the latest version of Zen (5.x-0.6 IIR).

When I start work on http://drupal.org/node/171464, I will look at this issue too.

I have the same issue.
I have to rename page.tpl.php every time I go to admin/build/themes
The problem is in the phptemplate_templates funtion in phptemplate.engine. This function uses the presence of a page.tpl.php file to determine the primary phptemplate themes list.

function phptemplate_templates($directory = 'themes') {
  return drupal_system_listing('^page\.tpl\.php$', $directory, 'filename');
}

I've lost some hours with this issue... (I've found this bug report later, when trying to post the issue)
I think this is a critical bug.
If the page.tpl.php overide doesn't work, I think it would be better for this functionality to be removed (or fixed if there's a easy way)

As someone asked before:
is there a straightfoward conversion process between zen and zengine?
and Is zenengine mature for production use?

More descriptive tittle with the symptom (and the cause)
This is easiest to find

About to commit a fix for this.

Added a zen-subtheme.php file that should be copied and included by sub-themes of Zen.

See the new zen_classic sub-theme for details.

Hey John,

The zen-subtheme files are marked as dead in cvs?

All the work has been going on in DRUPAL-5, not in HEAD. I've now synced HEAD with DRUPAL-5, so the new 5.x files don't appear to be in the Attic. Better?

I've implemented a better solution for this problem. The previous solution would have resulted in multiple copies of zen-subtheme.php and inevitable code drift.

The new solution is to include zen's template.php from the sub-theme's template.php file and let zen's template.php do all the heavy lifting.

In the sub-theme's template.php:

/*
 * Sub-themes with their own page.tpl.php files are seen by PHPTemplate as their
 * own theme (seperate from Zen). So we need to re-connect those sub-themes
 * with the main Zen theme.
 */
global $theme;
if ($theme != 'zen') {
  $themes = list_themes();
  include_once './'. dirname($themes['zen']->filename) .'/template.php';
}

This has been committed to 5.x-1.x-dev.

Not sure why I didn’t think of this sooner. This is now the preferred way (as seen in zen_classic’s template.php):

include_once './'. drupal_get_path('theme', 'zen') .'/template.php';