Zenophile module

Last updated September 12, 2012. Created by Garrett Albright on October 2, 2009.
Edited by Christopher Jam..., JohnAlbin, n8felton. Log in to edit this page.

Note: The "Zenophile" module is Not being developed for Zen-7.x-5.x

The module Zenophile 7.x-1.1 works with theme Zen 7.x-3.1,
but Not with Zen 7.x-5.x.

See... There won't be a new release of Zenophile for Zen 5, But thanks for using Zenophile in the past.

Zenophile allows themers to very easily create Zen sub-themes without all the tedious file copying and find-and-replacing required when creating sub-themes by hand. See Zenophile's project page for more information.

Installation and usage

1. Install the Zen theme, if you haven’t already.
2. Install and enable the Zenophile module like any other module. (Note that installing Zenophile is only necessary to create themes with it; it is not necessary to enable Zenophile to use a theme that Zenophile has already created, and Zenophile may be disabled and uninstalled after themes are created.)
3. If necessary, grant roles the permission to use Zenophile.
   • Drupal 7: “Administration” > “People,” and click the “Permissions” tab. Grant the “Create Zen themes with Zenophile” permission to the desired roles.
   • Drupal 6: “Administration” > “Users” > “Permissions.” Grant the “Create Zen themes with Zenophile” permission to the desired roles.
4. Go to the theme list page.
   • Drupal 7: “Administration” > “Appearance.”
   • Drupal 6: “Administration” > “Site building” > “Themes.”
5. Click the “Create Zen sub-theme” tab.
6. Fill out the form elements on this page. Initially you will only see some basic controls, but you can open up the “More options” fieldset for more tasty options. Click “Submit.” If all goes well, Zenophile will automatically copy and tweak the necessary files, and you will be told that your new theme was created. For more details on each of the form element choices, go to this page's child page Zenophile Create Zen Subtheme Options.
7. If speed is of high concern for the site to which you have installed Zenophile, you may wish to deactivate the module after you're done creating new themes.

Filesystem permissions issues

Without going too in-depth into the issue of Unix filesystem permissions, suffice it to say that you may encounter problems related to permissions with the themes you create with Zenophile.

Zenophile is intended to be used on testing servers which you have full control over (root access). In some environments, particularly shared hosting servers where you do not have root access, you may have difficulty accessing or editing the files and directories Zenophile creates. This is because those files will be “owned” by the user account that the PHP or web server process runs as, which is probably not the same user account that you use to access the server. If you have root access to the server, this is not a problem, as you can simply change the ownership of the theme directory and recursive files to yourself (hint: sudo chown -R <username> <theme directory>) and then go about your business.

If your shared hosting provider provides some sort of file management tool which operates through a web browser, you may be able to use this to change permissions on the theme’s files, since that tool will likely be running through the web server under the same user which “owns” the theme’s files.

However, basically, if you're trying to use Zenophile on a server which is not a testing server and you don’t have complete control over, you’re not using Zenophile in the manner it was intended to be used…

Zenophile has not been tested on Windows-based servers, but it will probably work.

Programming for Zenophile

If you want to modify Zenophile’s behavior, you can use its very simple API. Check out the comments in the zenophile_midnight.module file for all you'll need to know (probably). Besides a solid understanding of Drupal module coding fundamentals, you will probably need at least a basic understanding of regular expressions to build a Zenophile add-on module.

Questions? Suggestions? Need help?

Please open an issue on Zenophile’s issue queue or contact the author and I’ll get back to you soon. Thanks for trying Zenophile!