Make Zen easy with Drupal's Zenophile

Theming made a teensy bit happier by a genuine quick fix - Zenophile makes creating Zen sub-themes slick and easy. Now its not often that you find something that quickly improves your day. My other half, team mate and partner in crime - now he believes in doing things the hard way, the methodical, intelligent approach - you get it right, learn why it was wrong, and find out the odd interesting morsel of information at the same time. Now he's usually right and deplores my occasional foray into google quickfix mania, but there are days when you don't want the slog - you just want to get on and do what you're doing with no distractions. Well here's the story - and its for you to decided how you want to play your own day - 'it just works' or 'it just doesn't - but i know why'. In the process of creating a Zen sub-theme I hit a problem. Now its by no means the first time I've created a sub-theme - and upto now i've had no problem - but it's a bit of a drudge - copying this here, renaming that, editing the other etc. I'd noticed that bits and pieces exist to streamline the operation, but thus far had resisted the temptation and plodded, methodically through the appropriate steps. It was boring and tedious; but straightforward and worked. However on this occasion I soon found myself pulling out hair. I'd followed the steps, cleared the cache about a hundred times, checked the .info file, checked template.php and theme-settings.php, double checked, triple checked everything in fact, and then looked on line for new things to check and checked those too. So inevitably I'm at the bottom of the "How to build your sub-theme" node and cannot miss the "Automated ways to build a sub-theme" link - its not my fault - its there - its calling me. Hurray for that. Zenophile took a few seconds to download, unzip in my modules directory and enable on the admin>build>modules page. Then I simply went to admin>build>themes and there's a TAB a TAB that says: "Create Zen sub-theme". As simple as that. The Create Zen sub-theme page is pretty self-explanatory. A system name is given - you can change this, as well as adding a human friendly name and a description of the theme. You can choose the site directory for the theme, I go with 'All' as usual. Then we take a peek under 'More Options', they are few but all useful. You can choose to base your theme on the starterkit or on an existing sub-theme. There is a choice of fixed or liquid layouts and you can even ask it to play around with the proportions and positions of your sidebars (sub-module). A clean css file is available on request - Zenophile will create a 'my-sub-theme'.css and a 'my-sub-theme-fresh'.css (a blank file, thats included so you can start with a clean slate) - great if you find it easier to start from scratch and build up the css. If you've turned the sub-module on; there is also an option for starting off with a light on dark colour base. A magic little check box at the end, 'switch to theme on creation' will even automatically set the theme as default and switch it on on submit. What's more it worked, and so I created another sub-theme with a different system name, and hallelulijah it worked again! My verdict - this is really easy, really useful and involved no complicated setup or learning curve (the download, activate and create sub-theme took less time than the normal process) - I'm a happy girl, and gained the time to write this blog. Big thumbs up and thank you Garrett Albright.