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

Registering and installing a new theme


To see some of these TTW changes, we first need to understand how to get our theme exposed to our Zope instance as a filesystem product so that it can be installed on a Plone site.

Creating a product that overrides a resource in a skin layer requires:

  1. 1. Installing paster and ZopeSkel (done in the previous chapter).

  2. 2. Running the appropriate paster recipe to generate a filesystem product (done in the previous chapter using the plone3_theme recipe).

  3. 3. Registering it in your buildout (done in the previous chapter).

  4. 4. Registering a new filesystem directory view for that product (done by default).

  5. 5. Placing this view in the list of available skin layers by installing your product (done in the previous chapter).

  6. 6. Copying the relevant resources (templates, stylesheets, images, flash files, and so on) into the new skin layers contained within your filesystem product.

  7. 7. Customizing the resource.

Since we have already created a theme product in the previous chapter...