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

Chapter 5. Making Manual (TTW) Changes or What Not to Do

You can customize Plone by changing settings through the web (TTW) in the ZMI (Zope Management Interface), or by making changes to an installable filesystem product. TTW changes are hard to back up, hard to share, hard to repeat, and generally tough to work with. In Plone 3, the recommended method of theme development is on the filesystem, but we'll look at how you can make some quick-and-dirty changes TTW if needed, and also cover briefly how to bring those changes back out to the filesystem.

In this chapter, we step through how to make our Zope instance recognize our theme product, then make minor manual adjustments to a Plone site through the ZMI. Next, we learn how to get the same changes into our filesystem product by using GenericSetup profiles and other tools.

Specifically, this chapter involves a tour of how to activate a theme and how to use skin layers and non-Zope 3 elements to affect the look and feel of your site. The lessons...