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

Generating your theme product using paster


Now that we have a working buildout and working instance of Plone, we will generate our skeleton theme product using paster. As mentioned in the previous chapter, installing Plone gives us paster by default. If you don't get paster by default, follow the instructions in the previous chapter to install easy_install and ZopeSkel on your system.

Newer installers will be getting paster under the control of buildout so that paster is always available at bin/paster (from your instance directory). ZopeSkel will also be under the control of buildout so that it is updated when buildout is run in "newest" mode. This means you'll always be able to get the most recent updates to paster and ZopeSkel.

Available templates

A number of paster templates (not the same as page templates) are available to Plone developers for developing different types of Plone products, including themes. To see the available templates, you can run:

$ paster create --list-templates

This...