Zen
Last modified: August 25, 2009 - 03:09
For many people, Zen is the ultimate starting theme for Drupal. If you are building your own standards-compliant theme, you will find it much easier to start with Zen than to start with Garland or Bluemarine. This theme has LOTs of documentation in the form of code comments for both the PHP (template.php) and HTML (page.tpl.php, node.tpl.php).
Why should you use Zen? And why should you create your theme as a Zen sub-theme as opposed to just modifying an existing theme? Lots of reasons. You can also read several themer’s testimonials.
Besides this documentation, additional resources can be found…
Fatal errors
I think I've followed the README-FIRST.txt to the letter about locating the zen theme on one's site. Those instructions say to place the template within sites/all/themes. They also say that you must create a folder called "theme" (note that this one is singular). And they also say that you need to upload "the entire zen folder", although the unpacked theme doesn't actually have a folder of its own, so I created one. I used my vivid imagination and called it zen.
I've interpreted these directions in several ways and tried them all in my Drupal implementation. I note that there's no screenshot when Zen appears among the other themes available at admin/build/themes, but that's certainly not a problem.
What bothers me is that Drupal 6.18 apparently expects something different, and after selecting Zen as my theme, the admin panel goes bonkers:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function _zen_theme() in /home/xyz/public_html/sites/all/themes/zen/template.php on line 28
... and pretty much destroys my entire implementation. Information at the Zen download page suggests that thousands of people are using the Zen theme. How did they do it?
Building a sub-theme of Zen 6.x-2.0
I have followed all steps of creating a sub-theme per link at http://drupal.org/node/629510 and am now curious to how I should be modifying CSS. Should there be a separate file for all my edits?
Yeah, it's kind of ridiculous
Yeah, it's kind of ridiculous how creating your own sub-theme leaves you without knowing which is the first style sheet that gets loaded. And that lame "html-reset.css" comment section doesn't do anything to reduce the confusion.
where is the zen.css
just realized the instructions for 6.x-2.x are right there.