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

Plone add-ons for multimedia


Now that we understand the basics of how to insert multimedia code into our site, let's look at a few add-ons that can be used to add visual interest and extra metadata.

collective.flowplayer

Written by the talented Martin Aspeli, this tool is a lightweight Plone integration layer for Flowplayer, a great, GPL'd Flash-based player for FLV (Flash Video) and MP3 (audio) files. More information on Flowplayer can be found at http://flowplayer.org/, and the product can be downloaded from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/collective.flowplayer.

The integration is nearly seamless. You can upload a FLV or MP3 file as a standard file object, and from that you get a video player. There's no special content type, and no complex configuration involved:

Other features include the following:

  • It works with ZODB blob files

  • You get playlists for folders or collections

  • You can put videos in portlets

  • You can put video content into your content pages, with Kupu integration

Flowplayer is...