Plone's stock configuration delivers a great deal of concrete functionality: workflow, security, tagging, and more. However, the people whom you need to win over like your boss and the public—often form their first impressions of your site based solely on visual design. Replacing the out-of-the-box look of Plone with one tailored to your organization is thus a very important task.
Changing the overall look of a Plone site requires more than just the web designer's usual toolkit of HTML and CSS. In this chapter, we provide an introduction to the additional Zope- and Plone-specific techniques you need. We give an overview of Plone's somewhat complicated theming situation, show how to theme a site in a portable, reusable way, and demonstrate practices that strike a balance among ease, speed, and compatibility with future versions of Plone. Theming is a complex topic, and there are entire books on that topic alone, so we also give plenty of outside references in case...