In order to perform most of the customizations mentioned above, you need managerial rights to your site, light programming skills, and a little common sense. For some of the changes, you will need to be comfortable with the concept of Plone filesystem theme products, as discussed in the previous chapter. Please follow the steps in the previous chapter to generate a theme product and install it on your Plone site.
It will be helpful in some cases to have an understanding of TAL (the Zope Template Attribute Language) and TALES(Template Attribute Language Expression Syntax—it's expression syntax, but not critical yet). You can find a good description on them in The Definitive Guide to Plone (http://plone.org/documentation/books/definitive_guide_to_plone.pdf), and also in Zope's documentation (http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook/2_6Edition/AppendixC.stx).
We'll also briefly mention ZCML, XML, and Python, but will dig deeper into that later.