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 a theme for public use


A great number of individuals in the Plone community have graciously created themes for use by other people. The process for distributing these themes is fairly simple. It is important that the quality assurance process described above is followed, especially in terms of documenting dependencies, the installation process, and any content that needs to be created to support a theme.

You should store your theme product in Plone's "collective" SVN repository. To gain access to the repository, visit http://plone.org/documentation/manual/plone-developer-reference/overview/contributing. You can also find information on the Subversion commands you will need at http://plone.org/documentation/how-to/svn-import-to-plone-collective-unix/. Also, you should upload release versions of your theme product to the Python Package Index, PyPI. See the instructions at http://pypi.python.org/pypi for more information.

Then, you'll need to add your product to http://www.plone.org...