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 the architecture


Prior to Plone 2.5, Plone was built on top of the powerful, but relatively inflexible, Zope 2 architecture. As Plone evolved, more flexible Zope 3 technologies became necessary, but a full transition was impractical. In order to remain compatible with earlier versions of Plone and provide a migration path, it was important to provide a bridge between these two versions. You might have heard the name "Five", which is a product that helped bridge the gap between Zope 2 and Zope 3 (2+3=5) by backporting Zope 3 capabilities to Zope 2. Five is now baked into Plone, and is the basis of the Plone 3 architecture. What this means is that Plone runs on Zope 2, but uses some of the features provided by Zope 3, and thus is not a pure Zope 3 implementation.

Zope 2 plus CMF (the Content Management Framework) is best described as a framework that uses skin layers and acquisition to produce results. If you know some of the concepts of object-oriented programming, you might think of...