Theming Plone: Beauty, Brains and Brawn

By theming a Plone site you apply an organization's unique visual branding.

It is easy to apply simple changes to the Plone theme including using many pre-developed stock themes. This is a cost-effective way of achieving a web presence.

sample stock theme - GreenEarthTheme

There are several standard tools such as CSSManager that we recommend for modest customizations of a Plone site. These tools allow you to change the logo, colors and other visual properties of your Plone site with minimal knowledge of HTML or CSS.

Need more options?

Here are 3 approaches to Plone theming that we employ depending on your needs:

• creating a new Plone skin
• using a theming tool
• minimal public skin

Customized Plone skin

example of a customized Plone skin

Plone ships with a very functional user interface designed for a high degree of customization.

It allows for the highest degree of control over the page contents and is many times sufficient in itself to fully brand and visually enhance a Plone site.

Skilled Plone integrators can quickly adapt standard or stock themes to suit your needs by building on top of the solid base that Plone provides.

Theming tool

Theming tools like Deliverance can apply a common theme across one or more applications. The theme can be easily created by a designer with no Plone-specific knowledge.

For an example of Deliverance at work check out the plone.org website which applies the same theme to both Plone and a 2nd separate application, an issue tracker.

Plone.org uses Deliverance for theming

Using a minimal public facing skin

This special approach could be used for high performance sites or cases where a high degree of customization requires a different look for the public.

Conclusion

Plone offers many paths to theming bliss!

For many sites a combination of approaches is required.

Need helping making and implementing the right choices? Let us know, we can help.

We can analyze your needs, offer solutions, or both.