By hellrazer21 on

so this guy over here says tao is better but everyone i talked to on the forum so far said use zen

http://brianegan.com/drupal-theming-zen-vs-tao/

he talks about not having to go through firebug and all this stuff just to find out where things are in zen but with tao "if you want to avoid Firebug Purgatory, clean up your code, organize it in a way that’s logical to you, and make sites that are truly spectacularrrrr, the choice is clear: use Tao."

now that article is from 2010 but the tao theme has a 7.x version in beta im still new to drupal but im guessing that means it works with drupal 7(correct me if im wrong)

http://drupal.org/project/tao

anybody out there have serious experience with either one of these themes?

Comments

vm’s picture

vm commented

better is mostly subjective. Use the base theme that you are most comfortable with and that includes the feature set you seek. No one base theme is a perfect fit for every design or every user. Hence why there are multiple base themes available and will always be more than one approach to themeing. Regardless of the base theme used, understanding the underlying markup (HTML/CSS) is necessary. Thus using firebug will still come into play when you need to alter the style or override some CSS already being used. It's a useful tool to learn as it aids, not only in themeing your own site but in learning how other sites are themed and how to implement those things you find interesting from other sites/themes.

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

I like VM's comments, personally I lean to Omega or Adaptive, the point being there is more than one good base theme and the choices span even more that Zen and Tao.

dmatamales’s picture

dmatamales commented

I use both of these themes regularly and they're both great for different reasons. I'm happy with both, and I really don't think one is better than the other. They are just very different attempts at creating a "minimalist" base theme.

Tao really is as close to starting with nothing as you'd want to come. It gives you lots of nice CSS classes, implements a CSS reset, and does everything you'd want a theming engine to do, but pretty much nothing is styled. At all. This includes buttons, tabs, and the like (tabs like View, Edit initially show up as links, buttons just show up as bold words). The complete lack of styling can make things a bit confusing when you're just starting out, but the purpose is that you are not influenced by any theming that is preexisting and you're truly starting from as little as possible. What I've done is to configure my own mid theme that styles up some of the basic elements in a way that I like (and in Drupal 6, the admin elements, as I don't like using a separate admin theme in D6). And then for each project, I make a child of the mid theme, which is a child of Tao.

Zen is definitely a starting point that is quite a bit further along, things are configured to look extremely minimalist, but it starts out pretty much complete, meaning it could almost pass for a finished theme without any configuration at all. Many aesthetic, usability, and coding decisions have been made already and they're not yours. Of course, you can override anything that you don't like in CSS, but there's more of a temptation to leave elements with the original styling because, well, they look and work fine. You may see this as an advantage if you don't really care about dictating every little thing about the interface.

Zen also does a lot of other stuff for you. It sets up a grid system with columns implemented by default. It has responsive design built in. It is built for Compass/SASS and has a very neatly organized series of SCSS files. There is a place for everything and everything is in its place. It can at first be overwhelming how many different files are involved, but it's very clearly a well thought out system.

If you need to just get a project out the door quickly and you're not so concerned with learning about how Drupal theming works, or if you need responsive design fast and already set up, you'll want to go with Zen. It is a great starting point, and although some choices are already made for you, it's all pretty straightforward and you'll learn relatively quickly where everything is and how to change it if you want.

If you're just starting out as a Drupal theme developer, you're pretty good with CSS, you want to learn a lot about Drupal theming, and you don't need to get your theme done too quickly, I would strongly recommend that you start by building a mid theme in Tao, because you'll be able to focus more on how Drupal theming works. Just start styling up the elements and make things look good to your tastes. With Zen, there's a lot of work already done for you, but it may not be done in exactly the way you would do it if you were doing it yourself. The temptation is there to gloss over things, and instead of learning Drupal theming, you might end up just learning Zen theming– still a valuable skill, but perhaps not as transferrable.

P.S. Tao's 7.x beta version is extremely stable and great for use on production sites. I have used it for many projects, with tons of different modules, and I have yet to experience a single problem.