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

Deploying your theme on a server


We're not going to cover hosting here, as that falls under the sysadmin umbrella, but refer to http://www.plone.net, or #plone, for ideas on hosting companies. We're also going to skip over some more system-administration-type tasks and focus instead on the theming aspect of taking a site live.

The typical process for creating a theme involves the following:

  1. 1. Create a Subversion repository to hold your theme product.

  2. 2. Create a theme product using the paster recipe.

  3. 3. Add the theme product to the repository.

  4. 4. Add a development site's data.fs to your local instance. (This is only for client-specific web sites where the site structure will affect the design implementation. If you can theme a vanilla Plone site while keeping in mind the use cases that need to be solved, you should.)

  5. 5. Theme locally and test as you go.

  6. 6. Check the theme into Subversion. This is actually an incremental process, something you do as you go from stage to stage during the theming...