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

Modifying images using the custom folder


You can modify Plone-provided images (such as the logo.jpg provided with Plone) by going to the portal_skins folder, choosing the appropriate images skin layer (often plone_images), locating the desired image, and then selecting the Customize option.

You can also add new images to the custom folder and use CSS to style with those images. Eventually, those images will need to be extracted (using File | Save As) to your theme product's images folder. These images are not the same thing as content that will eventually end up on your site; they are specifically images that are used to build your theme.

One image that is considered "special" in Plone is the logo.jpg image. The viewlet that controls the logo references the base_properties code that looks for a file named logo.jpg. If you want to use a logo.gif image, you have to modify base_properties to look for a file with the .gif extension. If you wish, you can modify the viewlet for the logo to use...