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

Why a new approach?


The current approach to theming (also known as "skinning") the Plone sites (Plone 1.0 to 3.x) has been steadily evolving over a number of years, and is powerful, but somewhat complex.

As with most software, the reason for this complexity is usually a side effect of the evolution of the product—adding more functionality and more flexibility to meet the needs of power users, while still retaining the same approach to the problem space.

For Plone, the current theming approach has served us well for the last 8 years, but we realized it was time to reevaluate how theming was done, as it's such an integral part of managing a Plone site.

The main goals for a new approach were:

  • No requirement for the people doing the theming to know anything about Plone or Python.

  • Use standard tools and libraries whenever they are available.

  • Reduce the number of concepts you have to learn in order to get started.

  • When requiring you to learn something new, let it be a standard solution that is useful...