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

Portlets


In this section we will cover some of the basic concepts associated with portlet manipulation. Generally speaking, portlets are similar to viewlets in terms of their basic functionality. They render a portion of a page under control of a manager that maintains order.

As of Plone 3, portlets can be designated to appear in either the left column or the right column, formerly known as left_slots and right_slots, but they cannot yet display elsewhere in a site's structure without additional code. This is a limitation that Plone hopes to overcome.

You can adjust the portlet settings on a given folder or page using the @@manage-portlets page, accessible via the manage portlets links in the right or left columns of your site. See the Plone Users Manual (http://plone.org/documentation/manual/plone-3-user-manual) for more information on how to configure portlets on your site. Most importantly, you can define portlets at your site root that can cascade throughout your site's structure, or you...