Newbie: Family of themes with inheritance?
I have been playing with Drupal for my own site for a year or so now, but with a 'canned theme'. Now I have a side project to make a Drupal site for my employer.
I've started out making a Zen subtheme, and that's worked out OK so far but: the structure of the site (designed elsewhere) calls for 6 very similar themes for different sections, with different colours, menus and images, but the same page structure. So I want subsubthemes, just to override the images and add additional css for colours.
I tried doing that, and I found that if I added a page.tpl.php into my subtheme, then set the theme to the subsubtheme (I'm using Taxonomy Theme to assign themes based on a category), then it didn't use my page.tpl.php, or my css.
Is there a way to have 'inheritance' like this, or should I be looking in a different direction?
I did look briefly at zengine, which kind of had the sort of structure I wanted but no docs, and a discussion group that ended with the conclusion that it was obsolete.
Chiming In...
Let me say upfront that I am a designer, not a Drupal expert, and I am just getting a decent grip on php, etc. That said, I love the zen theme since I can build a highly-customized design using only css modifications.
Anyway, I think you can accomplish your goal by creating additional subthemes. (I'm not sure about the sub-subtheme.) I assume you're using the latest release of Zen. Within that framework, you can just copy/paste a whole directory, rename it, and update the associated paths/functions to create an additional subtheme.
For instance, take the 'zen_classic' folder, copy it and rename to 'yourtheme'. Inside that folder, change every instance of 'zen_classic' to 'yourtheme'. (If you use Dreamweaver, you can actually do a find/replace within that folder.) From there, you can modify your theme as you like. Once you have your site-wide css styles defined, you can copy/rename the 'yourtheme' folder to 'yourtheme_blue' and make the necessary changes to that theme (you would need to do the find/replace again).
I have only done this with up to 3 subthemes (using Taxonomy Theme also), and it works great. There is probably a much more sane solution out there, but for a Drupal newbie like me, this allows a lot of theming flexibility without having to learn everything at once.
Hope this helps a little. :)
Thanks for the reply, but
Thanks for the reply, but that's where I am right now. It's the "copy/rename" part I'm trying to avoid. What I'd like is a 'master' theme with all the layout and actual templates in it, and then additional subthemes that *augment* that with extra CSS and alternative graphics. So when we need to tweak the CSS or layout, it gets tweaked once for all the themes. And likewise, to create a new section with a new colour scheme, we just copy an existing subtheme and slot in the colours.
When I posted last night, I hadn't looked closely at PHPTemplate themes directly. The ones I saw (Zen, Garland) had lots of code in, and looked like a heavy solution. But a minimal PHPTemplate theme might do the job for me, and as I understand it, subthemes are part of that already. So that's my goal for today - PHPTemplate for the base, and subthemes to describe the colour schemes. The basic site is only really using Drupal as a backend organisation tool ('pure CMS' - just so I can pass the editing tasks onto the marketing people), and not any of the other features, so I can get away with just nodes and pages I think.
I know what you mean about learning everything at once, but I tend to work hard now to be lazy later :-)
Just to update my own
Just to update my own question... I have what I wanted now. I made a 'base' PHPTemplate theme which never gets used directly but holds the template.php, page.tpl.php and block.tpl.php (that's all I need for now), plus common images and the layout CSS. Then in subdirs of that I have 6 'subthemes' which supply the section-specific graphics, and a colours.css which all the colour components for that section (a tool to pull all those out automatically would be an interesting perl project).
I stole a little bit of code from Zen to add a path_to_subtheme() function, and a little more to add in the relevant CSS files, and it all seems to be working now. I think I understand enough of what Zen is doing that I could make the subthemes have code too, if necessary.
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