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

Adjusting web site content to support the design


As we can see, the installed theme does not exactly match the look of the first screenshot of this chapter. Many CSS styles are in place, but the searchbox is in the wrong location, and there is a calendar portlet present. You may also notice that breadcrumbs are not present, as they are suppressed using CSS styles. Additionally, the center page content is not yet populated.

To make the site look more realistic, we need to adjust our viewlets, as well as add and suppress some content and portlets on the web site to support the design.

First, let's adjust the viewlets on the site by going to http://localhost:8081/mysite/@@manage-viewlets. We have to do this because the Guria theme does not use ordering to organize the viewlets. At the time that the theme was created, ordering was not functional, but should be now. Using the up arrow, next to the searchbox with the orange "Go" button, you can move the viewlet directly below the viewlet called...