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

What this chapter will not cover


Beyond the realm of theming, there are a number of minor tweaks that integrators can make to a Plone site, and will likely need to make during the course of theming a site, but these tasks do not constitute theming, per se. These configurations enable the theming process, however.

For example, when you add a portlet, the portlet may give you a few options that allow you to control the look and feel of your portlets (such as including borders, including a header or a hyperlink, and so on). If you add a navigation portlet and modify it, or you modify the one that is installed by default, it gives you options to control whether that navigation displays at the root level, whether it shows all parents and children, whether to add borders, provide hyperlinks, and so on. Every portlet is different, of course, and may not provide all of these options.

Additionally, in Site Setup, configuration screens called configlets exist for various pieces of the Plone UI. These...