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…
What you will learn from this book
Create attractive themes using Plone 3 programming concepts
Customize your Plone theme and get a new look and feel for your web site
Set up a productive development environment for building a quality theme product
Use graphic design, Subversion, and other helpful tools that make theming easier and more efficient
Use Zope 3 components for building powerful Plone themes
Create an actual theme product using the Plone 3 theming concepts
Embed multimedia in a Plone template to make your theme more attractive and useful
Deploy and test your theme by following best practices