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

Sectional theming


As discussed earlier, a very common need for Plone users is the ability to create sub sites, sectional theming, and URL-based theme switching.

We already looked at how to do sectional theming by using the CSS hooks provided by Plone using shortnames. Another option is sectional theming via the use of Apache's mod_proxy and Zope rewrite rules. This approach will not be covered here due to its complexity, but tutorials on how this can be accomplished can be found at http://www.plone.org/documentation.

To make sectional theming even easier, a product named themetweaker.themeswitcher was written.

themetweaker.themeswitcher

This product is another gem written by the great folks at WebLion. It is described as a product for switching themes on folders (only those with the IATFolder interface as of this writing) in Plone. It works only with theme products that are registered as a browser layer, which is not a concept we will cover here. Browser layer declaration is a more programming...