Zenophile

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

Installation and usage

(Note that this guide targets the 2.0 branch of Zenophile, but much of it should be applicable to earlier versions as well.)

1. Install the Zen theme, if you haven’t already.
2. Install this module like any other module.
3. If necessary, go to Administration > Users > Permissions and grant groups the “create theme with zenophile” permission.
4. Go to Aministration > Site building > Themes. Click the “Create Zen subtheme” tab.
5. Fill out the form elements on this page. Initially you'll 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'll be told that your new theme was created.
6. 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.

Permissions issues

In order to use Zenophile, the user your web server is running as will need write permission to the ‘themes’ directory in the site directory you’ve chosen (and possibly to the site directory itself so that it can create the ‘themes’ directory if it doesn’t already exist). Also, you may experience difficulty accessing or editing the theme if the user that you yourself are working as does not have read or write access to the directory that Zenophile creates. You may need to tweak the permissions of various directories before you get the expected behavior out of Zenophile; your mileage may vary. Future versions of Zenophile may attempt to work around these issues.

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!