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

Is XDV ready for serious deployments?


Currently, the plone.org web site itself is using XDV for its theme—so it's battle-tested and ready for serious, high-traffic sites.

Background and history

Before starting, let us explain briefly the history of XDV, and the reason it exists.

When people talk about this new approach to theming, they will often refer to the general approach as Deliverance-based. The original Deliverance project (http://deliverance.openplans.org) was started by Paul Everitt (http://pauleveritt.wordpress.com) a long time ago, and was further enhanced by Ian Bicking (http://www.ianbicking.org), who is its current maintainer.

Along the way, Deliverance got more powerful and expanded beyond the initial goals, and started handling cases that were not included in the original scope.

Long story short, a new implementation of the same basic approach was started, called XDV. This is a stripped-down, pure XSLT implementation of the Deliverance concept, and can be compiled down and used...