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

About ZPT


ZPT is an invention of Zope Corporation, and is based on XHTML, which is HTML that conforms to stricter XML standards. XHTML requires code to be well formed (for example,<img />, <span></span>, and so on), and it requires that code to be properly nested and always in lowercase form. XHTML also allows you to create different sets of markup tags for new purposes. For example, you can create blocks of code, using a syntax such as <tal:block></tal:block> or <metal:block></metal:block>, to create better structured page templates. CMFPlone's main_template.pt is a good example of this code in action, though it can also be found in any .zpt or .pt file.

The goal of TAL is to be a templating language that allows for "round-trip" collaboration by themers and programmers. A designer may create a template, as he/she creates a normal XHTML document, using placeholder text. The designer may then pass it to a programmer or themer who knows TAL attributes...