Zen Midnight and Zenophile make Zen even more awesome

I just wanted to write a quick post to spa– er, draw attention to a couple of Zen-related contributions I've been working on recently which have made my life a lot easier and may do the same for you.

First off is Zen Midnight, a brand new Zen subtheme I just contributed yesterday. However, like the Themer's Starter Kit theme that comes with Zen, Zen Midnight isn't intended to be used by itself; it's intended to be used as a starter theme for your own themes.

The idea behind Zen Midnight is… Well, have you ever tried to build a theme with Zen that uses light-colored text on a dark background? Things get ugly really quickly. The images that make up the tabs use light-colored backgrounds, though the text links on them are now light-colored as well; likewise with the background colors for table rows and such, like on the Status Report page. But with Zen Midnight, all shades of gray are inverted and all colors are darkened everywhere in core styles and images (or that's the idea, anyway; it's still early and I've probably missed some nooks and crannies), which allows you to get started building a light-on-dark theme with much less eyesore on the outset. Just check out the screenshot and you'll get the idea.

Next is Zenophile, the natural progression of my old zenify.sh script. If you dread the process involved in creating new subthemes, you need to try thsi module. It allows you to very quickly create a Zen subtheme: choose the parent theme, give a name and description, select between a fixed or liquid layout, and click a button. Zenophile does all the monotonous file copying and editing for you and creates a new theme for you in its own directory, ready to go. If you want to get fancy, you can also opt to change the sidebar and page widths, and Zenophile will automatically do the math for you (great if you can't wrap your head around negative margins!) and add it all to a sidebars.css file in your new theme. This makes starting new Zen subthemes very easy - maybe even fun! Of course, it works well with Zen Midnight - just select Zen Midnight as your parent theme when creating your new subtheme.

Of the several (too many!) modules that I've contributed to Drupal, Zenophile has easily and quickly become the one I find myself using most often. (Why didn't I think of it sooner?!) I hope it can be as useful to you as it is to me.