Zen is the ultimate starting theme for Drupal 5. If you are building your own standards-compliant theme, you will find it much easier to start with Zen than to start with Garland or Bluemarine. This theme has LOTs of documentation in the form of code comments for both the PHP (template.php) and HTML (page.tpl.php, node.tpl.php).
The idea behind the Zen theme is to have a very flexible standards-compliant and (relatively) semantically correct XHTML theme that can be highly modified through CSS.
Out of the box, Zen is clean and simple with a provided fixed-width subtheme called Zen-fixed.
The name is an homage to the CSS Zen Garden site where designers can redesign the page purely through the use of CSS.
We are hoping to build up a library of CSS-based Zen subthemes, so feel free to hit this one like the Zen Garden and see how far you can extend it through CSS.
This theme has been written for Drupal 5 and there is (currently) no version for 4.7
Features:
- Well documented template.php file.
- Lots of easy-to-access classes and ids for CSS developers.
- Classes on body include items like "logged-in", "not-logged-in", "front", "not-front", as well as the node type ("ntype-story", "ntype-blog", etc) for single node pages. This can allow CSS developers to do things like have a different color for a given page item for non-logged-in users, have a larger header section on the front page, or put a different background color on a given node type.
- Automatic (table-less) column resizing for 1, 2, and 3-column layouts.
- Separate layout.css file to allow for changing the type of column layout (holy grail, jello mold, etc). Default layout is based on Garland's system.
- New: print.css file optimizes print display automatically when sent to a printer -- removes, sidebars and nav elements, optimizes font size, adds text to links showing href, etc.
Task Force
There is now a Zen task force group to help discuss, test, and fix bugs, develop CSS-based subthemes, and improve Zen as a framework for further theme development.
Note:
There seems to be a conflict between some host installations of SiteBuilder and the Zen directory name. If you experience this problem, simply change the name of the theme directory from "zen" to "zen-theme" and you should be back in business. More about this issue here.
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