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 8. Understanding Zope Page Templates and the Template Attribute Language

Plone uses a page templating mechanism known as Zope Page Templates ( ZPT). ZPT, in turn, uses a language known as the Template Attribute Language(TAL). ZPT also uses a language called Macro Extensions, known as METAL, which is outside of the scope of this chapter.

In this chapter, we'll cover the theory of TAL's basic constructs and see how a real Plone site might output dynamic content using these expressions. For the definitive information on Zope Page Templating, please refer to The Zope Book:

http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook/2_6Edition/ZPT.stx.

The objective of using a templating language is to output dynamic content while minimizing the amount of code in page templates. Ideally, templating languages should play nicely with tools that designers might use to theme around a web site. In other words, a tool like Dreamweaver should ignore code, even if it cannot output the dynamic results. An extra...