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

Installing the theme product


Now that we've looked a few of the changes we've made to distinguish our theme product from a default Plone theme, let's go ahead and install it. Some of you may already have installed your theme product, and that's okay.

Go to your Zope instance (for example, http://localhost:8080/manage_main), and choose Plone Site from the drop-down list on the top right. Or, you can go to this URL: http://localhost:8080/manage_addProduct/CMFPlone/addPloneSite.

You will then see the following screen. For the purposes of this chapter, we are calling our Plone site mysite. Make sure you add a description for your Plone site, as we'll need that later.

There are three ways to install your theme product:

  • You could optionally choose the theme product from the Extension Profiles list (as seen in the previous screenshot)

  • We could proceed to the portal_quickinstaller tool, located in the ZMI at http://localhost:8080/mysite/portal_quickinstaller/manage_installProductsForm

  • We could go to...