3 Colors Theme : a collective phantasy based theme

Since Plone base properties style could seems too rich for a standard use case, phantasy skin edit forms could be also too complex.

When i saw how easy it is to change some skin properties in a blog system like word press ( …),  i thought we need the same feature in Plone.

Collective Phantasy is done for that.

Building a new skin product with a standard static theme and a customized skin schema is something you can do easily with collective phantasy.

If you want an example, just test the « 3 colors theme » plone product.

In your buildout :

in instance eggs section add :

    collective.threecolorstheme

in zcml section add :

    collective.threecolorstheme
    collective.threecolorstheme-overrides

Relaunch your buildout.
Launch your zope instance.

In plone_control_panel you will get :

Check for « Three Colors Theme » Product, this will install the product and its dependencies :

Go back to the home page, of course the « static » theme has changed (my poor contribution to plone themes community)

We want to change the dynamic properties, so we click on « Contents » tab, and we can see that everybody is here : the dynamic root skin for portal, and the phantasy skins repository (read previous posts …) :

We want to build a new skin, so as we have seen in previous posts, in phantasy skins repository we add a new skin :

In this form you could see differences with a classic phantasy skin form (for developpers/integrators look at the code it’s just some easy Archetypes bidouille) :

– 3 colors only + mutators to change all colors

– an entire fieldset removed

– many fields unuseful in this theme are hidden

– some skin attributes added in schema

Go back to reality : just change some colors

Now we will import a skin sample provided in « three colors theme product ».

In alternate_skin folder you will find a zip file and a txt file (howtouseit.txt).

Click on « import images and files », choose the alternate_skin.zip file

Read howtouseit.txt and change some colors or properties

Use plone kss power to change images’ names quickly

CTRL-F5 to refresh the page, of course you need some design feeling to understand what’s happen here, but it’s not so complicated (…)

In the product you will find another example with another howtouseit.txt, here, then just add a folder and choose the good phantasy skin and you will get :

Loving Plone 🙂