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

Summary


In this chapter, we have learned:

  • What elements comprise the component architecture for a theme product

  • How to make minor adjustments to a Plone site through the ZMI and portal_actions and extract those changes into a filesystem product using Generic Setup

  • How skin layers work and how acquisition affects images and page templates

  • How to work with images and page templates in the custom folder and on the filesystem

  • How to work with stylesheets and JavaScripts in the custom folder and on the filesystem

The real message of this chapter I am trying to communicate is that through-the-web development is evil, and it should not be used if you can help it. If you do TTW development of any kind, you should always bring your changes out to the filesystem, and wash your hands twice when you're done.

Now, using what you have learned in this chapter, you should next be able to learn about Zope 3 components and how they differ from skin layer objects. At this point, you are ready to move away from changes...