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

Extracting items from the custom folder


Remember that anything located in the skins/ directory can be modified through the web via portal_skins and that any of these items ultimately belong in your skins/ directory in your filesystem product. This includes images, stylesheets, JavaScript files, page templates from CMFPlone (found in portal_skins), and Python scripts.

Assuming you have customized items inside of your Plone site, you can extract these items and add them to your theme product in a couple of different ways. Optionally, you can go to the custom folder, open each individual file, and cut-paste it into your theme product's skins folder.

To move images into your theme product, copy them from your custom folder (or right-click and choose Save As) and put them in plonetheme/mytheme/skins/plonetheme_mytheme_custom_images. If you test this with a file named logo.jpg (with the custom folder cleaned out) and refresh your site, you should see your new logo.

In addition to moving images into...