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

Prerequisites


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.