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 your site via CMF action categories


On your Plone site's home page, you will notice various areas where there are menu options or buttons. As you can see from the next screenshot, the default Plone site shows a top navigation area, various links for printing or emailing a page, as well as menu actions that allow you to cut, paste, or otherwise manipulate the objects within a folder.

You may also see tabs or widgets that allow you to access the contents of a given folder, a History area, a Sharing tab, and various tabs on the top for Home, Users, News, and Events. It may help to log into your new Plone site as we walk through these items.

Many of these tabs, buttons, and menu objects correspond to actions defined in http://localhost:8080/mysite/portal_actions/manage (where mysite is the name of your Plone site) in the ZMI. You must log into your site's ZMI in order to see the available portal_action categories.

By default, there are seven CMF action categories. For practical purposes...