Zen sub-themes, sass vs inheritance

Question

I may be running into two conflicting methodologies here.

Basic Drupal theme philosophy is to sub-theme and only change what is different from the sub-theme.

I am using taxonomy hierarchy and theming their views slightly different.

Taxonomy       Theme
--------       -----
Zone           MyBaseTheme
-Arts          ArtsTheme (change the header image)
--Dance        ArtsTheme (change the header image)
---Company1    Comp1Theme (change the header image and menu items)
---Comapny2    Comp2Theme
--Theater      ArtsThee
---Thespians1  Thesp1Theme
---Thespians2  Thesp2Theme
-Sports        SportsTheme
--Boys         SportsTheme
---Football    FootballTheme
---Baseball    BaseballTheme
--Girls        etc
---Field Hockey etc

This would seem to mean the I could subtheme off of zen then only make some minor changes for each. Common stuff such as font size and spacing would be done in MyBaseTheme. Zen seems to use a large font for instance so I want to make it smaller.

I could change the banner images in each sub-theme off of MyBase.

So far so good except...

Zen seem to want to use the SASS methodology for CSS coding.

Copying Starter Kit stuff is getting me whole copies of every CSS attribute for every sub-theme. I don't want copies, I want inheritance.

Anyone ever run into this problem? Thoughts?

Answer 1

see this issue queue How to Approach Sub-Sub themes with Zen?

You dont copy zen starter kit for every sub-theme. You basically copy the .info file and template.php and create your theme folder. If you copy zen starter kit for every theme you'll run into the problem your seeing you end up "spamming" css files everywhere.

Sub-themes are best built smallest to biggest. By which I mean start off with the smallest number of .info file attributes and build up to the subtheme you want.

With so many subthemes you should be able to come up with 1 generic "base sub-theme" you then base all your subthemes off of in code.

Every sub-theme needs 1 uniquely named CSS file to properly fire off inheritance.