Getting started (5.x)
- Download Zen from http://drupal.org/project/zen
- Unpack the downloaded file and place the zen folder in your Drupal installation under one of the following locations:
- sites/all/themes (making it available to all Drupal sites in a mult-site configuration)
- sites/default/themes (making it available to only the default Drupal site)
- sites/example.com/themes (making it available to only the example.com site if there is a sites/example.com/settings.php configuration file)
- Log in as an administrator on your Drupal site and go to Administer > Site building > Themes (admin/build/themes) and make Zen or one of its sub-themes the default theme.
Currently available Zen themes:
- Zen — the base theme
- Zen Classic — the html and css for Zen 0.7
- STARTERKIT — the placeholder to create sub-theme’s of Zen
Optional:
- Install the Theme Settings API module. Available from: http://drupal.org/project/themesettingsapi
This module is built-in to Drupal 6, so why not add it to your Drupal 5 installation?
- From the Theme settings page (admin/build/themes) configure the Zen theme or a sub-theme and note the additional settings that are now available under the "Theme-specific settings" heading.
Note:
There seems to be a conflict between some host installations of SiteBuilder and the Zen directory name. If you experience this problem, change the name of the theme directory from "zen" to "Zen", edit all the theme's php files and change every occurrence of "zen" with "Zen", and you should be back in business. More about this issue: #91335: SiteZen site builder conflicts with theme name "zen".
Renaming not clear for sitebuilder problem
It's not clear if just the file names have be changed from "zen" to "Zen", or if all occurances of the text "zen" inside the php files has to change as well. This is a really complex change for someone wanting to use this theme. Unfotunately, siteground.com, one of the primary hosts recommended by drupal.org, has this "sitebuilder" problem. Lots of folks will continue to see this. There should at least be an alternate .zip file made that corrects this issue so everyone doesn't have to do this complex set of edits.
Renaming of 'zen' to 'Zen'
I believe I've made the necessary changes to the zen theme to allow it to be placed in the "Zen" directory to avoid the SiteBuilder bug. A copy of the zipped theme is here:
http://pages.mckoss.com-a.googlepages.com/Zen.zip
The list of source changes (diff file) is here:
http://pages.mckoss.com-a.googlepages.com/Zen-patch.txt
I'm very new to theme development, so if anyone notices something wrong about these changes, please let me know.
I would have preferred to put the directory name in a theme-accessible variable, so that any directory name could be used and only change it in one place in the source (or better yet, derive it from the initialization of the theme). But I wasn't sure where to put that, so I took the easy way out and changed all the occurrences of 'zen' that I thought were used for path calculations.
- Mike