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

Buildout and you


Prior to Plone 3, setting up Plone was fairly straightforward: you installed Plone and dropped all of your Plone add-on products into a Products directory. Making modifications meant that you simply edited a template and your changes showed instantly. While that sounds simple (and for themers, it was), it was not flexible or repeatable, and resulted in the development of monolithic products that were difficult to distribute or reuse and could only be used in the context of Plone.

Since Plone 3, the development environment has moved toward a more pluggable "egg-based" environment. Eggs are a way to package and distribute Python packages, with certain metadata intact. The Python library that powers the egg mechanism, setuptools, is able to automatically locate and download dependencies for eggs that you install. This technology means that it is easier to create shared, repeatable, and easily-configurable development or staging environments. The Plone community has also standardized...