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

Modifying the various sections of the page


In order to make many of the changes to our themes take effect, we should make sure that our theme product's configure.zcml file (not the browser/configure.zcml file) contains the following lines:

<include package=".browser" />
<include file="skins.zcml" />
<include file="profiles.zcml" />

These lines tell our theme product that it should respect any changes made to our profiles.zcml file (where our theme product's profile is registered with Zope), and also within the browser/ folder, where many of our viewlets and page template changes will occur. These lines are added to the theme product by paster by default. It also tells our theme product to respect any filesystem directory views defined in skins.zcml.

Basic styling

As you can see by installing the theme, there is already some basic styling in place. Let's take a look at this styling. First, I set a few base properties in our theme product's base_properties.props file, located...