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 the Template Attribute Language


TAL is a concise language, and is not hard to follow once you understand the basic statements and what they do:

  • tal:attributes—dynamically change element attributes

  • tal:define—define variables

  • tal:condition—test conditions

  • tal:content—replace the content of an element

  • tal:repeat—iterate over a sequence

  • tal:replace—replace the content of an element, and remove the element leaving the content

  • tal:omit-tag—the same as tal:content, but also removes the wrapping tag on which the statement is applied

  • tal:on-error—handle errors

We will walk through these expressions in greater detail, and also look at how the structure expression syntax (TALES) can be used.

tal:attributes statement

First, let's look at an example of a tal:attributes expression that is used for img src or href to change a class:

<img src="doesn't matter because it will be subbed out dynamically" tal:attributes="src string:http://google.com/logo.jpg" />

In this example, the src attribute is being assigned...