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

Setting up your development environment


In order to get set up and start theming, we first must get the development environment set up. This generally consists of installing Subversion (optional, but highly recommended), and of course, installing Plone and all of its dependencies.

Subversion for version control

The importance of version control cannot be underestimated in the development process, especially where teams are concerned. It can also be valuable for a team of one person, if only to keep your product safe and up-to-date in a central location, known as a repository. It's not required, but serious themers will find it invaluable. Subversion is not included by default with a Plone installation.

Subversion is a free/open source version control system originally started by Collabnet: http://www.collab.net/. It manages files and directories and the changes made to them, over time. Subversion, often referred to as "svn", allows you to recover older versions of your data, or examine...