Now, let's take a short trip into BlankTheme history; this project began with the need of a central "template" to build themes fast and with ease. Sharing ideas in the community forum, we (Dave, Erik and me) found each other and we were enthusiastic to have this new tool. The BlankTheme Team was born: I was working on the initial simple skeleton using the basic Zikula Theme Engine features; Erik was working on a variety of menus for Zikula (a main feature for developing themes) and Dave with his endless testing, documentation and support.

Our first thought was to integrate a CSS Framework to avoid cross-browser compatibility issues, and we found an additional large list of features in these frameworks when we were exploring them. We thought of the best ways to distribute the theme templates and to make them maintainable and even considered the best names for each component.

We've chosen the YAML CSS-Framework mainly because of its flexibility. It let us define our columns with any width. At that time many CSS frameworks were fixed to a grid and hard to adapt to open webdesigns out there. Thanks to Dirk Jesse (YAML's author) for his work and his support when we needed it. In YAML we found many cool features, all that we needed and more. Two months later, the first ported template was ready: CoolWater. Later Erik ported UnderTheBridge and Dave added the preview_images and the awesome logo.

After porting several open webdesigns and testing and fixing the templates, styles and menus, we have now a fantastic tool. A tool with which we can develop our themes quickly and with features that we didn't have before.

The idea now is to improve the framework among all, form a community and port many good looking themes for Zikula. Also, alternative templates sets for third party modules can be developed, like the phpBB3 silver theme ported for Dizkus, which is now the official look and feel .
We can make very user friendly things just adjusting the templates, that's the invitation here. Forums and a Wiki will soon be available here to share tips, tricks, knowledge and other stuff.

Enjoy BlankTheme and Share