Hi,

Zen is a great theme and has been a constant part of my workflow in Drupal 7 for several years.

The things that have made Zen such a great match for me is it's simplicity. Styling out of the box is kept to a minimum, and there's not a great deal of utilities built in beyond Zen Grids - so I do not have to spend lots of time overriding stuff or switching features off.

I've been trying to use Zen on a Drupal 8 project and fear that some of those "USP"s (for want of a better word) have been lost. I've had to give up on Zen 8.x on this particular project as I found myself having to get my head around a variety of different features that I don't really need - e.g. typey, lint, gulp, styleguides. All things which mean that a task which would normally take me a couple of minutes to complete ends up requiring a lot of research. Compilation of my SASS ends up taking about 30 seconds which is pretty much a deal-breaker.

Sorry if this sounds rather negative - however I feel I have a responsibility to let the maintainers know of the issue as it may affect the uptake of Zen 8.x generally. I suspect there are quite a few front-end developers who have established workflows and sass libraries that they use and being forced to use the ones packaged with Zen is a negative.

May I suggest that there be an option for a "vanilla" Zen starterkit theme - stripped right back and using just zen grids and compass?

Thanks

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Fully agree

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JohnAlbin
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Location Taipei, Taiwan
CreditAttribution: JohnAlbin for ImageX commented
Title: Complexity by default » Complexity in alpha version is not fully explained
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

The Zen of yesteryear is Classy. Classy is a simple base theme, just templates and CSS files. If you want that simplicity, it is built right into Drupal core already.

Zen for Drupal 8 is still alpha-level code. Very rough. I'm still figuring out the best practices for building a Drupal 8 theme with a modern component-based approach.

I suspect there are quite a few front-end developers who have established workflows and sass libraries that they use and being forced to use the ones packaged with Zen is a negative.

Yes, there are. And they have never used Zen. Which is totally fine.

May I suggest that there be an option for a "vanilla" Zen starterkit theme - stripped right back and using just zen grids and compass

Zen has always tried to use the best tools and the best practices at the time. Compass is quite dead as a project. It hasn't been updated in over 2 years. https://github.com/Compass/compass

If you talk to the Sass community, you'll find that they have switched from the Ruby Sass/Compass compilation to the node-sass compiler with Gulp or Grunt and replaced Compass with other tools.

Compass provided 3 major pieces of functionality:

  • CSS3 vendor prefixes. Everyone uses autoprefixer now, including people who don't use Sass.
  • asset handling/sprite building. Lots of tools to choose from; no consensus. I've simplified Zen to only use a single Sass mixin for image handling.
  • Type styles. No clear consensus, but I really like the Typey group of mixins. It is simpler to use then Compass was.

So, no, I would highly recommend to NOT use any Drupal 8 theme that includes Compass. Browsers continue to change and the last version of Compass doesn't support any browser versions that were released in the last 2 years.

I've been trying to use Zen on a Drupal 8 project

It is an alpha release. Lots of sharp edges. If you aren't willing to help make it better (contribute docs, fix bugs, slow compilation, etc.), you should wait for a full release. Or switch to the Classy theme.

Good luck!

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Leo Pitt CreditAttribution: Leo Pitt commented

Thanks for your reply.

Zen for Drupal 8 is still alpha-level code. Very rough. I'm still figuring out the best practices for building a Drupal 8 theme with a modern component-based approach.

As you say, it is alpha so perhaps my expectations were not inline with that.

Yes, there are. And they have never used Zen. Which is totally fine.

Well, I've been using Zen for about 5 years. I think the learning curve from Zen 7.x to 8.x is pretty steep at present. As you say, it is alpha so perhaps that will change.

I'd happily switch to Gulp if I could get it to compile my code in less than 30 seconds. I will try and make a contribution to the issue on that subject.

Thanks for maintaining and developing the project - it's fantastic just a bit over my head on 8.x at present.