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

About GenericSetup


GenericSetup is a major step forward in managing Plone site configuration, and is a core part of how Plone handles its own site creation process. It is easy to get GenericSetup conflicts because it is sometimes unintuitive (unless XML is your first language), but it is also very powerful. It's also important to use care to protect yourself against settings that might have been made through the web.

Within the ZMI for your site, click on portal_setup, which is the control panel for managing your GenericSetup. There are three tabs that are important to point out here: Import, Export, and Snapshot. We'll look at each of these in turn, but first, let's get a sense of what GenericSetup is.

GenericSetup introduces the idea of the configuration profile. A profile is essentially a set of steps defined using XML. Each .xml file defines what happens in one of those steps. Note the fundamental difference between a profile and an install method: install methods define a set of steps...