Book Image

Plone 3 Theming

Book Image

Plone 3 Theming

Overview of this book

Themes are among the most powerful features that can be used to customize a web site, especially in Plone. Using custom themes can help you brand your site for a particular corporate image; it ensures standards compliance and creates easily navigable layouts. But most Plone users still continue to use default themes as developing and deploying themes that are flexible and easily maintainable is not always straightforward. This book teaches best practices of Plone theme development, focusing on Plone 3. It provides you with all the information useful for creating a robust and flexible Plone theme. It also provides a sneak peek into the future of Plone's theming system. In this book you will learn how to create flexible, powerful, and professional Plone themes. It is a step-by-step tutorial on how to work with Plone themes. It also provides a more holistic look at how a real-world theme is constructed. We look at the tools required for theming a web site. The book covers major topics such as configuring the development environment, creating a basic theme product, add-on tools and skinning tricks, integrating multimedia with Plone, and configuring your site's look and feel through the Zope Management Interface (ZMI). Finally, the book takes a close look at the thrilling and greatly simplified future of theming Plone sites.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Plone 3 Theming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Changing the default home page display


The Guria theme product ships with a few different examples of how you could modify your home page layout. It is important to note that not all of the CSS has been written to support all of these different views. The intention for final implementation was to use the homepage_view method (not homepage2_view), and styling for the former's look and feel is completely in place. The homepage2_view styling is only partially complete. Look in the theme product's guria_templates folder to see these two templates.

Using CSS styles and the visual editor

Let us look first at the simplest way to customize your home page: using CSS styles inside of the visual editor to create a different look and feel. We can accomplish this either by doing some small, simple coding in our CSS stylesheets, or we can add this code to our theme product via a kupu.xml (or similar) GenericSetup file in our theme product's profiles/ directory. Kupu is the current visual editor for Plone...