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

Graphic design tools


Any serious skinner needs a graphic design tool with certain capabilities in order to take the design files and assemble them into a finished web site. In particular, layers and the ability to slice pieces of a design and export those pieces are essential. Layers allow a themer to hide pieces not needed in a finished CSS theme, such as text that will eventually become real HTML on a page. Slices, meanwhile, are the pieces of an overall design that are exported during the layer manipulation process. They are the images the end user eventually sees on the rendered page. This is different from cropping, which actually alters the size of the canvas; slices are just pieces of the overall design, cut with precision, exported, and then manipulated with CSS.

The most commonly used graphic design tools used for web design are Adobe® Photoshop®, Adobe® Fireworks® (formerly Macromedia) tool, and open source tools such as GIMP. It is not generally recommended to use tools such as...