littled.net

Getting to a point where I can even start building my theme has been an uphill struggle, but I think I’m almost there. Unfortunately, getting to this point has neatly coincided with the end of my few days off work so I’m going to have to put it to one side for a bit.

There’s been some helpful correspondence on the OOTB Plone Themes discussion list about using a tableless main_template (thanks Tim Knapp and Simon Kaeser). I’ve downloaded the Plone Tableless theme from plone.org and I’m going to integrate this with my product, not try to do anything more complex like create a dependency on it. Apparently there are a few problems with it, like needing to use some Javascript to hide empty columns. Hopefully I’ll be able to provide some more feedback on it by using it in my theme.

I’ve had real problems getting my head round configuring the viewlets and portlets but I think I’ve pretty much cracked it, as far as I can. In the end, I manually set the viewlet order using /@@manage-viewlets and then exported this via portal_setup/export (it creates a viewlets.xml which you put into the product’s profiles/default folder). I tried to reorder the portlets too, first by using /@@manage-portlets and then by using Aleksandr Vladimirskiy’s terrafirma theme’s portlets.xml file as the basis of my own. This hasn’t worked in terms of reordering, so I’m not sure if it’s even possible to do this. I don’t count this as a show stopper however; after all the whole idea of the portlets is to make them configurable by the user.

So, now I’ve got to:

• Copy over the main_template and associated files from Plone Tableless
• Get the final generated HTML
• Style this in Dreamweaver (I prefer to work this way)
• Break it down and create the final finished theme product