Compatibility with Zen 6.x-2.0

Currently, the theme is compatible with the 6.x-1.x versions of Zen. As mentioned here:

http://drupal.org/node/628468

a bit of work is required to make subthemes compatible with version 6.x-2.x. I will try to get an updated version out soon, but for now, you must continue to use zen 6.x-1.x. As noted,the 6.x-1.x series of Zen will continue to be maintained. I will post a note on the theme main page explaining this and will update when a new version is ready. I apologize for any delays.

Zen version 6.x-2.0 is now the recommended release (see http://drupal.org/project/zen); are there any plans for CTI Flex to support it?

Subscribe. Is there at least a dev version we can try with Zen 2.0?

I have had some success using the new Zen theme with the current CTI_flex. These changes were needed:

1. Add the following line to the cti_flex_preprocess_page() function in the file sites/all/themes/cti_flex/template.php

   $vars['body_classes'] = implode( ' ', $vars['classes_array'] );

2. Add the following function to the same template.php file...
   

   function cti_flex_preprocess_block( &$vars, $hook ) {
     $vars['classes'] = implode( ' ', $vars['classes_array'] );
   }
   

3. copy all of the png files from zen/STARTERKIT/images to cti_flex/images
4. create a subdir called cti-flex/css and copy these files to it from the zen/STARTERKIT/css directory
   1. tabs.css
   2. pages.css
   3. ie.css
5. edit the stylesheets section of cti_flex.info and add the styesheets mentioned in the previous point.
   

   stylesheets[all][]   = css/tabs.css
   stylesheets[all][]   = css/pages.css
   stylesheets[all][]   = fluid-layout.css
   stylesheets[all][]   = cti-flex.css
   
   conditional-stylesheets[if IE][all][] = css/ie.css
   

   Note that the zen.css stylesheet was removed. I could not figure out what purpose it served.

I don't know if this is the optimal or preferred configuration - maybe all css files should now go in the css dir. And I have not done any extensive testing, but I seem to have all my pages looking exactly the same now with Zen 2.x as they did with Zen 1.x, which was the objective, right?

Hope this helps others. I like the cti-flex theme - it deserves to be properly maintained.

-Dio

Can the maintainer of this theme please give a status update on this? If there is no official Zen 2.0 compatibility soon I have to switch the theme, in order to get support for the Skinr module.

Thanks.

I apologize for the delay. I've been working on getting the new version ready (with all updates relevant to the new Zen version but also some feature improvements) and will have the release out this week. Thanks for your patience.

Oh great news! Thanks for the update.

Ok, folks the new version is up. A word of caution - this was a pretty significant overhaul of the theme. Zen made some big changes in its latest version and I tried to incorporate them all, but that changes a lot of the markup and general theme organization (see my upgrading notes on the theme project page). So if you have done much customizing of this theme, it will probably take a bit of work to get the latest version the way you want it. There are a lot of classes/ids that have been renamed in the page template and that changes a lot of the CSS as well. So if you are having any problems with the upgrade, please let me know and I'll try to help out.

Or if you prefer to try to continue using the original version series (6.x-1.x) I would also be happy to help get that modified to work with the latest Zen version. The changes listed above (#5) should fix most of the problems, but I suspect there may be a few other issues that crop up.

Thanks for all your feedback! Let me know if you find any bugs with the latest version.

Just spent the better part of a week getting this upgrade to work properly. I originally created my own theme based on the cti-flex theme. Some notes on upgrading to the newer versions of Zen and CTI-Flex.

Pay attention to those version numbers!

Zen and CTI Flex go as a pair. Zen 6.x-2.x has a very different directory structure than version 6.x-1.x. It is best to remove the old directory completely and extract the new 6.x-2.x in it's place. Extracting the new files in the old directory structure will leave leftover files that can mess things up.

For the same reasons, remove and replace the cti_flex directory as well. CTI-Flex is, after all, derived from Zen.

A simple subtheme

There are two files of interest in a simple subtheme directory. I'll call this theme wally.

The first is the themes/wally/template.php file

<?php 
// $Id$
/**
 * @page
 * Override theme_() for the Wally theme
 */
 
/**
 * Implementation of HOOK_theme().
 */
function wally_theme(&$existing, $type, $theme, $path) {
  $hooks = cti_flex_theme($existing, $type, $theme, $path);
  return $hooks;
}

This piece of code allows you to use all the resources of the CTI-Flex/Zen theme files (templates and css) without having to copy them to your own theme directory.

The second is the themes/wally/wally.info file

; $Id$ 

name        = Wally
description = Modified cti-flex theme, 1000px width, Fivestar voting on posts, Up/Down voting on comments. 
core          = 6.x
base theme = cti_flex

stylesheets[all][]   = layout-fixed.css
stylesheets[all][]   = wally.css

; Block regions - these must be defined here for wally/cti_flex/zen derivations to work
regions[sidebar_first]  = First sidebar (left)
regions[sidebar_second] = Second sidebar (right)
regions[navigation]     = Navigation bar
regions[highlight]      = Highlighted content
regions[content_top]    = Content top
regions[content_bottom] = Content bottom
regions[header]         = Header
regions[footer]         = Footer
regions[page_closure]   = Page closure

With the previous Zen/CTI_FLEX 1.x versions, I did not need to define the block regions in the info file. I had to add them here to get the 2.x version to work. The wally.css file has some custom color and backgrounds. The site uses a fixed-width layout, and the layout-fixed.css file was needed to set the preferred CTI Flex layout. It was the only cti_flex file that I copied into to the wally directory.

Some block names have changed with 2.x:

left becomes sidebar_first
right becomes sidebar_second

highlight and page_closure are new blocks

An error message will appear to indicate that the old names (i.e left) are not valid. With the updated software, the left sidebar was missing - which included the Navigation and Login blocks. This was quickly remedied by visiting the admin/build/block/list page and adding the Navigation and Login, (or whatever) blocks that were previously in the left region. The new block regions in the info file will be displayed in the dropdown lists when you add a block to a region.

Microsoft IE8 trouble - too many stylesheets and CSS optimization

I decided to test out the upgrades with different browsers. Everything was simply splendid with Firefox, Safari, Google and Opera. But with Microsoft Internet Exploder 8, it blowed up, blowed up good. The sidebar regions were gone along with all the cool colors and backgrounds. Even the CTI-FLEX scheme did not work properly. I had a look a the source code generated by IE8 (ctrl-U). I noticed that wally.css and layou-fixed.css was missing.

A bit of searching on the internet revealed that IE8 does not accept more than 30 (or 31?) css stylesheet files. This is beyond stupid. Some doofus must have hard-coded an arbitrary number into the browser code.

A bit more reading and I discover that if I go to the admin/settings/performance page and enable the Optimize CSS files option (like any serious production site) my problems will be solved! All those CSS files get merged into one (for performance purposes) and IE8 is happy!

Enable CSS optimization and watch everything go all to hell

So that's what I did - enabled css and js optimization. Boom. It blowed up! Blowed up real good! At this point every browser reported an error on every page. Different errors (and advice) from each browser.

Firefox - Problem loading page - The connection was reset
IE8 - Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage.
Google Chrome - This webpage is not available
Safari - Failed to open page - Safari can't open the page - The error is: “unknown error” (kCFErrorDomainWinSock:10054)
Opera - Connection closed by remote server

Apache log - [notice] Parent: child process exited with status 3221225477 -- Restarting.

This is worse than the WSOD. After much more searching I was able to recover the system by manually setting the css and js optimization off by manually altering the database table "variables" and deleting every record in every table whose name began with "cache". You won't need to do this - keep reading.

There is a much debated bug in a regular expression used by the drupal css optimization that causes certain servers to crash (see here, here, and here). I use Apache 2.2 on a Windows XP box. It was a chosen one. Curiously, thr Linux production server does not have the problem. Apparently the original code was created to handle a 'IE5 Mac Hack'. It remains in Drupal core to this day.

I'm no expert, but this smells like runaway recursion causing a stack overflow. Fortunately, this patch corrected the problem for me. I hope it becomes part of Drupal core soon.

Will the messages ever stop?

After applying the patch, I got a whole new series of error warning messages. Permission denied in function unlink() at drupal/includes/file.inc at line 459. This I could deal with.

All that was left at this point, to make all the messages go away, was to change some permissions on some directories (sites/default/files/css and sites/default/files/tmp). These directories hold cache files - and permission was denied in the function delete_file() . Windows allowed the system to create the file but not to delete it.

Did I mention how much I love Microsoft?

Sounds like a nightmare; I'm sorry about your problems. I've made a note about the 30 stylesheet limit on the main project page as that is coming up a lot. But this is the first I've heard about the problems with CSS optimization and some servers. You may want to post your experiences elsewhere too, as this is obviously an issue not limited to this theme.

I'm closing this issue now, as I'd like any problems with the latest release to be posted as new issues. Just easier to handle them separately.

I would mention the CSS optimization/aggregation problem in the documentation anyway. No harm and much good form having complete documentation.

I think it's mainly windows products that are affected. I run Apache 2.2/Win. IIS was also mentioned in the postings on the subject, many of which were quite recent. I would post this issue elsewhere, but I'm not sure where at this point. The problem has been around for at least two years now and probably longer. When I googled for the Apache error code, the postings went way back.

FWIW - I think you have done a great job on cti_flex theme AJ , it's too bad about the IE8 thing, but once everything is hashed out, it just plain works. It is super simple to subtheme, which means I don't worry about downloading the latest theme update next time (I hope). Keep up the good work!

-Dio

But this is the first I've heard about the problems with CSS optimization and some servers. You may want to post your experiences elsewhere too, as this is obviously an issue not limited to this theme.

On a closing note, though I never did take your sage advice about posting elsewhere, someone noticed and the infamous IE5 Mac Hack is now gone from CSS optimization.

Drupal 6.19 runs patch free for me. Hooray and THANKS!