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

Non-Plone-specific products for theming


Plone theming obviously has some community tools that have been created to make the theming process easier, but it's also possible to incorporate some advanced technologies. The following are a couple of non-Plone-specific products that can be used to alter the look and feel of your site.

sIFR

sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) is a technology that allows you to replace text elements on screen with Flash equivalents. It is explained in depth at http://wiki.novemberborn.net/sifr3/, and can be seen in action at http://www.dogwoodinitiative.org (see the portlet header elements).

The idea is to use fonts that are embedded within a Flash file and render those on a web page instead of standard text. The process is actually quite simple, but has some delicate syntax that can be a bit painful to get right. It's best to follow the source code found in the official demo (http://dev.novemberborn.net/sifr3/beta2/demo/), and to refer to the discussion forum if...