Aw cmon Ray - it could easily be 30 degrees in April in Melbourne, sunny, nice.

But then I suppose later in the day, it could be 4 degrees, sleet and rain...

People say in Melbourne, if you don't like the weather, just wait a couple of hours!

I'm sure we're going to put on a good show for the 'Bots, tho. :)

so is zengine then replaced by the zen theme? if not, what are the differences and when would you use one over the other?

from what i saw in the last release of zen, everything now happens in sub themes

you take STARTERKIT, you clone it, you rename some files and functions, you copy files from the parent zen directory and voila

you are no more supposed to alter zen files and as a consequence i now see zen like the drupal themer pack that once started to live

at first, i thought sub-themes were only a way to create a different version of a master theme by tweaking only small parts of it, which is what css zen garden illustrates by tweaking the css

i didn't understand the efforts zen puts into allowing sub-themes to be like "normal" themes: have their own template.php, have their own .tpl.php files, have their own theme-settings.php etc

as you confirm in the podcast it is a way to allow "more customizations", by moving the one level up: not only you tweak at the css level, but you can also alter some bits of php

right now, "the theme part of zen" as been moved to "zen/zen_classic"
and what's now inside the "zen/" directory is kind of a mix of a skeleton theme (a good practices recipe on how to do it the modern/standard way while fixing some browsers (IE) quirks) and a theme engine

to sum it up, i can see the value in zen: it breaks css into semantically different files, it teaches good practices, it's hella well documented etc. but i also fail to see the difference between

1. pretend sub-themes don't exist, copy the zen folder into another directory, rename the files and php functions, start customizing
2. rename the zen/STARTERKIT directory into zen/foo, rename the files and php functions, copy even more files from the upper "zen" folder depending on what you want to customize (php/css cascading), start customizing

i would definitely have more interests in sub-themes if we had a system/engine that would allow us to specify a "master theme" we are allowed to customize (currently the files in the zen folder kinda consist in this "master theme" but you're not allowed/supposed to alter it) and then sub-themes depending on it --> as a consequence, the "master customized theme" would enable us to centralize common customizations instead of copy pasting them from sub-theme to sub-theme

even an other way of customizing would consist in being able to override only a small part of page.tpl.php or node.tpl.php instead of being obliged to copy/paste the whole file

i wrote all of this while listening, and at the end jjeff seems to share the same questions about zen being more an engine that outputs default markup done the good way (tm) than a theme because indeed it's a theme you have in your list but you don't use it

maybe i'm asking myself too much questions and instead of wondering about all this i should have coded my theme (or sub-theme ?) :)

now i guess i want to hear your opinion / enlightenments :)

thanks for the podcast, the theme and everything

How does Zen(gine) compare to the YAML framework? They look very similar.

More info:
http://www.yaml.de/en/
http://drupal.org/node/92325

Do you have transcripts of your podcasts? I would like to learn more about Zen, but I don't care about Drupal con, training, etc. and find it difficult to get past the chatty bits of the podcasts to the content without missing things.