Zenophile

Note: Zenophile is not compatible with the new 7.x-5.x (HTML5) branch of Zen, and probably never will be, particularly since Zenophile itself supports automatic subtheme generation via Drush now. Thanks for a good run, loyal Zenophile users!

Zenophile allows themers to very easily start new Zen subthemes without all the tedious file copying and find-and-replacing required when creating subthemes by hand. It also simplifies other common tasks when creating Zen subthemes, such as adjusting the width and placement of some page regions. Zenophile includes a simple API allowing developers to create their own modules to modify Zenophile's behavior and add their own features.

Zenophile includes two sub-modules. The Zenophile Midnight submodule adds CSS and graphics for easily starting a theme with a light-on-dark color scheme. It also serves the dual purpose of demonstrating Zenophile's basic API for interested developers. The Zenophile Sidebars submodule allows you to easily adjust the width and placement of sidebars. It will do the math for you and add a new CSS file to get everything in place.

Zenophile Sidebars probably doesn't work correctly for building themes to be used with RTL (right-to-left) languages. If you are familiar with building site designs using one of these languages and can help improve Zenophile’s support for these, please contact me - no PHP coding experience necessary.

Praise for Zenophile:

I've been taking peeks at Zenophile for ages but never committed to trying it out. How silly I was. I ought to have tried this module months ago.

My verdict - this is really easy, really useful and involved no complicated setup or learning curve… I'm a happy girl…

Note: Zenophile is not intended to be used on shared hosting servers or other servers you don't have root-level access to; otherwise, permissions problems may occur and you may be “locked out” of the theme Zenophile creates for you. See the documentation for more information about this issue. (If you are not sure if you're using a shared hosting server, then you probably are.) Caveat Drupalor.