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

Adding your theme product to your buildout


Our theme is a Python package by default, which means that it is ready to be "eggified" for easy distribution, but it's not an actual egg yet. An egg is a sort of hard-boiled Python package. Eggs don't include setup.py or various other parts of the package. Our theme product, however, does contain these parts.

Since we are still in development, we want to put our new skeleton theme product into the src/ directory, which is where we originally generated it. Open your buildout.cfg file located in the root of your buildout.

Note

If you are working with a production buildout, you can optionally create a new configuration file, called development.cfg, and make your modifications there. This can help to provide slightly different setups while in development mode versus production mode. For example, you wouldn't want PDB (debugger) to be available in a buildout on a production server, but you might very well want that to be part of your development buildout...