This is ZenGarage

ZenGarage is a showcase tool that may help you to develop and present different visual styles for a single set of templates. All by the power of CSS.

ZenGarage was strongly inspired by Dave Shea's CSS Zen Garden which is a site that... well, you already must know CSS Zen Garden. Think of ZG as some kind of personal CSS Zen Garden

With ZG you aren't limited to just one single template. Instead of that, you can set any number of projects that contain numerous templates and many different styles.

Currently, you are loking at the _default project, which is the project that opens by default (d'oh!) with ZG. You can switch to any template or style available for this project in the toolbar at the top.

You may even choose another project. There must be almost one more for this demo.

Often, I have to present three or four variations of a design i am making for a site to my customer. Sometimes they are radically different but almost always they are subtle details. So, when I got tired of the old manual way, I built this little useful app for make easier for both me and my customer to switch between different styles.

After using it for a time, I've realized that it may have some other uses.

Rapid CSS prototyping

It may be psychological, but with this tool I can make severely different styles (some of them radical!) in no time.

Keep organized

I'm not a very organized person, but with ZG I force myself to keep everything sorted by projects, templates and styles.

History Tracking

Each time, my customer request a change in the design I make a new style folder for it, that way we can notice easily the progress (or detriment) of the design.

Plenty of less serious little things

Not everything is client work. You may even use ZG for playful things like

• Inventing new techniques
• Compare between various bizarre layouts
• Initiate CMS template contests
• Mount your own personal CSS Zen Garden
• ... or even ___________________________! (fill in the blank)

For Installing you'll need:

• A server with PHP 4.1+ running
• mod_rewrite enabled
• one computer :)

Download the last version here

Just uncompress the downloaded package in your webserver and voila! It's running