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 6. Working with Zope 3 Components

This chapter is probably the most technically challenging chapter that you'll read in this book, but read it with the objective of getting a basic understanding of Zope 3 and the moving parts you'll need to know about. You'll generally need to only understand where to find the pieces you require, where to put them, and how to tie them together, and that will come after this introduction to the general concepts.

As part of this chapter, we'll cover how images, stylesheets, and templates can be exposed as Zope 3 browser resources, instead of being used as "old school" skin layers, as discussed in the previous chapter. We'll also cover some of the jargon-y terms that you'll need to know about but not understand in depth.

About the architecture

Prior to Plone 2.5, Plone was built on top of the powerful, but relatively inflexible, Zope 2 architecture. As Plone evolved, more flexible Zope 3 technologies became necessary, but a full transition was impractical...