Posted by Garrett Albright on April 28, 2010 at 4:48pm
Our Drupal sites are hosted on a multisite Drupal installation. Most of the sites use a Zen 1 subtheme and use Zen as installed in sites/all/themes. However, I've been using Zen 2 for new projects, putting the Zen 2 directory in sites/example.com/themes. This works well, but now I've got about ten different Zen 2 directories strewn about my Sites directory, which isn't good.
Has anyone else run into this? What's the best way to deal with it? I'm hesitant to just replace sites/all/themes/zen with a Zen 2 installation because I don't want to break the couple dozen Zen 1-using sites' themes… Should I just create a single Zen 2 directory somewhere and symlink to it at sites/example.com/themes/zen for each Zen 2-using site?
Comments
Rename?
Garrett,
I've dealt with the existence of Zen 1 and Zen 2 dependencies in a multisite configuration by renaming Zen 2 (for which I have fewer subthemes) from "zen" to "zen2" in the .info file and preprocess functions. I used the 'find' feature in Dreamweaver to find all the instances that needed to be changed. Then, in the subthemes, set the base theme as zen2.
The biggest problem with this is the Zen 2 upgrade path; however, I find it easier to perform these steps than to keep track of which sites and subthemes depend on Zen 2.
I don't know that this is the best way, but it's an idea.
~Renee
Renaming
Sounds like the best way to deal with this situation. I think I would rename the older versions of zen to 'zen*' and keep the current version named 'zen'. Assuming that upgrading the current version will be most important, this would make it slightly easier to maintain.
http://cleaver.ca
Well, I'm not too keen on
Well, I'm not too keen on this method because it would break both Drush and Zenophile, two very important tools which are going to expect Zen's directory to just be called "zen." Hmm.
EDIT: Giving cleaver's post a re-read… It seems like that approach would actually not break Drush and Zenophile, in as far as I will probably use them far more often with Zen 2 than Zen 1 in the future. Tweaking the themes for the Zen 1-using sites to use a "zen1" directory might be a pain, but it might be an automatable pain. Hmm again…
The Boise Drupal Guy!
Makes Sense
Cleaver's suggestion of renaming the OLD versions makes sense. I currently have more Zen1- than Zen2- dependencies, but at some point that will change... and Zen1 seems to be pretty stable at this point, so upgrades aren't needed frequently.
I'll second that Hmmm....
Great news if possible
I've been researching precisely this, and surprisingly little is found. I've run multisite for development for a while, and now want to begin developing with Zen 2 (before D7 is ready, naturally).
@rjoy, I was happy to finally find confirmation this has been done, and on a sandbox installation appears to have worked, but the part about only changing the names of the preprocess functions - what about all the other places I find "zen_"? There are other functions, and also zen_path - where things might seem to work but seems they would be accessing from the plain named zen.
Can anyone of you actually running this setup, elaborate on if you ended up changing more than the preprocess functions? My plan is to rename zen1 and keep zen 2 as "zen".
Rekindle
Very happy to find this thread. This is exactly what I need to do.
I'm importing a Drupal website into a multisite (adding it to the family, as it were). One of my themes is built using Zen 6.x-2.1. The theme of the site I'm importing uses 6.x-1.0-beta3.
Upgrading the theme of the site I'm importing from 6.x-1 to 6.x-2 seems unnecessary and perhaps more complicated than need be (several CSS files need to be modified, etc). So, the best solution seems to be running two versions of Zen, but I haven't successfully managed this yet.
Steps I took:
There are still glitches in the theme display (looks like the div tags are not using the old zen version, so it doesn't seem to be calling the right page.tpl.php file).
Not sure what to try (rename?) next. If I find a solution (by reading a bit more about the zen structure), I'll post it here.
Thanks.
What about the multisite's /sites/ folder?
I would think you'd be able to specify the base version of Zen for this one site using the built-in multisites specificity features, without having to rename anything.
zen 6.x-2.x lives in sites/all/themes/zen
zen 6.x-1.x lives in sites/mysite.com/themes/zen
So, mysite.com will see zen1 instead of zen2, since it's the 'zen' in the more-specific folder. I would also put the subtheme in sites/mysite.com/themes just to be safe.
solution
@solona, first of all, name the Zen 6.x-1 base theme to zen1, rather than zen2, and keep the current version named zen, to avoid future confusion and as noted above, the 2 version is the one that is more likely to get updates.
JohnAlbin provided a patch here: http://drupal.org/node/835554#comment-3266466 and it worked perfectly for me. Check how it relates to your version of zen 6.x-1, or at least it will show you what needs to be changed.
Thank you
Thank you both for such quick and helpful replies!
@akalata, I did exactly this and it worked without changing any of the file names.
@echoz, thanks so much, I bookmarked this and I'm sure it will come in handy.
Cheers!
Oh yes, of course that is the
Oh yes, of course that is the reasonable solution when only one site is using 6.x-1. I was stuck on the use case of having multiple sites in 6.x-1 and wanting to continue with more multiple sites in 6.x-2, which is what this thread was about.