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Drupal Podcast No. 55: John Albin Wilkins and the Zen Theme
February 26, 2008
- Artist: Lullabot
- Title: Drupal Podcast No. 55: John Albin Wilkins and the Zen Theme
- Album: Drupal Podcast
- Year: 2008
- Length: 78:35 minutes (18.66 MB)
- Format: Mono 22kHz 33Kbps (VBR)
Jeff Robbins interview John Wilkins about the Zen theme and the other work he's done with Drupal.
Comments
Sun and Palm trees in Melbourne
Hi guys,
Yes, there are a few palm trees in Melbourne ... but don't expect to see too much sun especially in April!
Melbourne is known to have terrible weather! It isn't the "sun and sand" part of Australia ;)
Ray Smith
Four seasons in one day
Aw cmon Ray - it could easily be 30 degrees in April in Melbourne, sunny, nice.
But then I suppose later in the day, it could be 4 degrees, sleet and rain...
People say in Melbourne, if you don't like the weather, just wait a couple of hours!
I'm sure we're going to put on a good show for the 'Bots, tho. :)
I agree Caito
Hehe,
I agree with everything you say Caito.
I just made a little comment as most people not from oz think of scorching hot deserts!
If you're visitng Melbourne in April it would be advisable to pack some warm clothes ;)
I'd love to be able to attend the Lullabot training sessions (and the other Drupal events in Melb.) ... but a week out of my schedule will be difficult to fit it at this stage ... I'm still hoping and would love to hang out with the bots and other Drupal geeks ;)
zengine obsolete?
so is zengine then replaced by the zen theme? if not, what are the differences and when would you use one over the other?
Game of Leapfrog
The short answer is "use Zen". In the past, the projects have tended to leapfrog one another, but generally tried to stay in sync with similar features. They are both VERY similar, but right now Zen is in the lead by about 4 months and I think I may throw in the towel for Zengine and not upgrade it to Drupal 6. Currently, all of the major features of Zengine are included in Zen, so there's really not a reason to use it.
The only advantage in Drupal 5 is that Zengine themes can live on the top level and they're easier to find/maintain for developers coming in to a project. (Zen themes *in Drupal 5* have to live in a subdirectory of Zen.) However, with Drupal 6 this has all changed and Zen-based themes can live anywhere.
Go with Zen. It's documented!
seems that zen is more an engine than a theme right now
from what i saw in the last release of zen, everything now happens in sub themes
you take STARTERKIT, you clone it, you rename some files and functions, you copy files from the parent zen directory and voila
you are no more supposed to alter zen files and as a consequence i now see zen like the drupal themer pack that once started to live
at first, i thought sub-themes were only a way to create a different version of a master theme by tweaking only small parts of it, which is what css zen garden illustrates by tweaking the css
i didn't understand the efforts zen puts into allowing sub-themes to be like "normal" themes: have their own template.php, have their own .tpl.php files, have their own theme-settings.php etc
as you confirm in the podcast it is a way to allow "more customizations", by moving the one level up: not only you tweak at the css level, but you can also alter some bits of php
right now, "the theme part of zen" as been moved to "zen/zen_classic"
and what's now inside the "zen/" directory is kind of a mix of a skeleton theme (a good practices recipe on how to do it the modern/standard way while fixing some browsers (IE) quirks) and a theme engine
to sum it up, i can see the value in zen: it breaks css into semantically different files, it teaches good practices, it's hella well documented etc. but i also fail to see the difference between
i would definitely have more interests in sub-themes if we had a system/engine that would allow us to specify a "master theme" we are allowed to customize (currently the files in the zen folder kinda consist in this "master theme" but you're not allowed/supposed to alter it) and then sub-themes depending on it --> as a consequence, the "master customized theme" would enable us to centralize common customizations instead of copy pasting them from sub-theme to sub-theme
even an other way of customizing would consist in being able to override only a small part of page.tpl.php or node.tpl.php instead of being obliged to copy/paste the whole file
i wrote all of this while listening, and at the end jjeff seems to share the same questions about zen being more an engine that outputs default markup done the good way (tm) than a theme because indeed it's a theme you have in your list but you don't use it
maybe i'm asking myself too much questions and instead of wondering about all this i should have coded my theme (or sub-theme ?) :)
now i guess i want to hear your opinion / enlightenments :)
thanks for the podcast, the theme and everything
Interesting questions ...
I've been wondering too, whether to just rename zen and hack away, or go the sub-theme route.
Zen* vs YAML?
How does Zen(gine) compare to the YAML framework? They look very similar.
More info:
http://www.yaml.de/en/
http://drupal.org/node/92325
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