Zen is the ultimate starting theme for Drupal. If you are building your own standards-compliant theme, you will find it much easier to start with Zen than to start with Garland or Bluemarine. This theme has fantastic online documentation and tons of code comments for both the PHP (template.php) and HTML (page.tpl.php, node.tpl.php). This theme saved me at 2am. Three hours of messing with 1000+ lines of nasty Garland-adapted code later, I abandoned it and recoded the site as a Zen sub-theme in under an hour. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
- Greg
The theme “Zen” turned out to be the public favorite and won the “Best Drupal Theme” title.
- Award announcement for the Drupal Hall of Fame Award by Packt Publishing
You can see more testimonials in the online documentation.
The idea behind the Zen theme is to have a very flexible standards-compliant and semantically correct XHTML theme that can be highly modified through CSS and an enhanced version of Drupal’s template system.
Out of the box, Zen is clean and simple with either a one, two, or three column layout of fixed or liquid width. In addition, the HTML source order has content placed before sidebars or the navbar for increased accessibility and SEO.
The name is an homage to the CSS Zen Garden site where designers can redesign the page purely through the use of CSS.
