Drupal 7 : Building a sub theme from Zen

Why Zen theme ?

The Zen theme is the nat­ural first step when them­ing Dru­pal. It reduces Dru­pal down to the essen­tials, allow­ing for a solid foun­da­tion to build up from. The alter­na­tive? Copy­ing files from the core themes is messy, and start­ing from scratch is time-consuming.

Down­load the Zen Theme. Included is the base zen theme and sub-theme tem­plate, STARTERKIT.

Copy every­thing into sites/all/themes/zen on your web server. Move the STARTERKIT folder up a level into sites/all/themes. Separating the base theme makes upgrad­ing zen the sim­ple mat­ter of over­writ­ing the zen folder with the newer ver­sion. Files within the zen folder will remain unal­tered. All con­fig­u­ra­tion is done within the STARTERKIT sub-theme.

Copy every­thing into sites/all/themes/zen on your web server. Move the STARTERKIT folder up a level into sites/all/themes. Separating the base theme makes upgrad­ing zen the sim­ple mat­ter of over­writ­ing the zen folder with the newer ver­sion. Files within the zen folder will remain unal­tered. All con­fig­u­ra­tion is done within the STARTERKIT sub-theme.

Rename the folder “STARTERKIT” and “STARTERKIT.info.txt” file to match your new theme and remove “.txt” exten­sion. For exam­ple, “mysubzen” and “mysubzen.info”. Open that info file and change the fol­low­ing lines:

name and description at your convenience as shown above …

Also Add line stylesheets[all][] = css/style.css and create this empty file style.css which will override every existing zen style from parent.

For example the style.css below will give this appearance (use firebug to locate classes and div tags) :

Do not Forget Templates files :

1. Edit your sub-theme to use the proper function names.Edit the template.php and theme-settings.php files in your sub-theme’s folder; replace ALL occurrences of “STARTERKIT” with the name of your sub-theme.

   For example, edit mysubzen/template.php and mysubzen/theme-settings.php and replace every occurrence of “STARTERKIT” with “mysubzen”.

   It is recommended to use a text editing application with search and “replace all” functionality.

Important Note :

Remem­ber to des­e­lect “Rebuild theme reg­istry on every page.” in Admin>Appearance>Settings(sub-theme)