littled.net

I started looking at the HTML generated by the Plone Default theme and guess what — the portal columns are in tables, like the old default theme for Plone 2.5x. The thing is, with Plone 2.5x you could use “Plone Tableless” as the basis for any theme customisations. Not so with Plone 3 — there is no Plone Tableless theme for Plone 3.

So, what happens now? I’m not happy with using table-based layout as the basis for my theme as:

• It’s bad practice
• It’s unnecessary
• The theme I’m developing for Plone is pure CSS and I don’t fancy retro-fitting it to a table-based layout
• It doesn’t reflect well on Plone as a product
• I’m a firm believer that the technology shouldn’t determine the design

It appears my options are:

1. Base my theme on another third-party theme product, e.g. NuPlone, Plone Tableless for Plone 3 (currently in 0.1 Alpha release) or some of the skins offered by the Quinta Group
2. Amend main_template so all table IDs become div IDs; i.e. transforming my main_template back into the old Plone Tableless theme

My preference is for option 2 — this is the least work, being, what, a five minute job? Option 1 would involve downloading extra third-party products, ensuring the relevant dependencies are specified in buildout, my product’s configure.zcml, setup.py or wherever they need to go. That’s not a five minute job, in fact it seems like a completely over-engineered solution to me.

In terms of best practice for the theme development, we’ve been asked not to touch main_template and I can largely see why. But in this case it seems like the most sensible solution. I don’t believe in being purist for the sake of it.

I’m hoping I’ll become convinced by Plone 3 development methods. At the moment they seem to be adding another layer of complexity to a job that shouldn’t really be that hard.