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

Validation tools


Having a good graphical editor and a solid set of CSS browser add-ons is a step in the right direction, but as with any project, the proof is in the finished product.

At the end of every project, any good CSS themer needs to check his/her CSS and his/her HTML for cleanliness and adherence to the W3C standard. The best resource here is the official W3C validation web site, known as Jigsaw, which is used by the Validate Local CSS and Validate Local HTML options available with Firefox's Web Developer Toolbar.

We'll talk about this more in future chapters, but Plone gives us approximately 20 stylesheets out of the box that you can extend and override by using a stylesheet named mytheme.css or similar.

This means that when using the Jigsaw service, it's important to fix the inconsistencies located in mytheme.css, but there isn't much need to worry about issues in the original Plone stylesheets, which are fairly clean already and the errors Jigsaw points out are not that significant...