Plone theming: some minor annoyances and victories

January 17th, 2009 · 3 Comments

I’ve started work in earnest on theming a Plone 3 site this week and have come up against some minor annoyances. But, this was balanced out by some of the cool things I learned too.

Portlets.xml

One of the great things about generic setup is that you can configure your site through the web and then export your settings as a series of xml files to your filesystem theme product. However, configuring my portlets and then exporting the resulting portlets.xml file caused some problems when re-installing the product.

I’d customised my navigation following the steps outlined in the article Customising navigation in Plone 3. This was fine. But when I re-installed my theme product containing an exported portlets.xml file I got a “ConstraintNotSatisfied” error. I didn’t get very far with finding a solution to this on Google, but by trial and error found out that this disappeared if I removed the following from the <assignment name=”navigation” …/> directive:

Secondly, default portlets (login, news, recent etc.) I’d removed via “manage portlets” weren’t reflected in my portlets.xml file so I had to enter this manually into my portlets.xml file:

<assignment remove=”true” name=”login” category=”context” key=”/”

manager=”plone.leftcolumn” type=”portlets.Login” />

<assignment remove=”true” name=”calendar” category=”context” key=”/”

manager=”plone.rightcolumn” type=”portlets.Calendar” />

<assignment remove=”true” name=”events” category=”context” key=”/”

manager=”plone.rightcolumn” type=”portlets.Events” />

<assignment remove=”true” name=”news” category=”context” key=”/”

manager=”plone.rightcolumn” type=”portlets.News” />

<assignment remove=”true” name=”recent-items” category=”context” key=”/”

manager=”plone.rightcolumn” type=”portlets.recent” />

<assignment remove=”true” name=”review-list” category=”context” key=”/”

manager=”plone.rightcolumn” type=”portlets.review” />

CSS Registry

To ensure that the order of CSS files in the CSS Registry was honoured I had to enable the auto grouping property (which didn’t exist in Plone 2.5.3). In the cssregistry.xml you can set this via:

The order seemed to go a bit haywire again if I enabled debug mode in the CSS Registry.

More positive things

It’s pretty straightforward to override viewlets for different content types. For instance, I didn’t want the breadcrumb trail to appear on my home page. In my browser/configure.zcml I simply added this directive:

<browser:viewlet

name=”bbkschool.path_bar”

manager=”plone.app.layout.viewlets.interfaces.IContentViews”

for=”Products.BBKHomePage.interfaces.IBBKHomePage”

layer=”.interfaces.IThemeSpecific”

template=”nopath_bar.pt”

permission=”zope2.View” />

In the “for” attribute I specify the interface of the content type I want this to apply to. The template, “nopath_bar.pt” is simply an empty template in my browser directory.

Lastly, Gloworm came in really handy as did plone.reload (although I found this a little unpredictable at times).

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Tags: blog-post · plone · plone-themes · plone3 · web design · web development

3 responses so far ↓

1 David // Jan 18, 2009 at 10:08 am

Oops. There was a slight typo in this post which has now been corrected.

has been corrected to
2 David // Jan 18, 2009 at 10:10 am

Well, that was useful. That should have read:

<navigation assignment=”navigation” …/>

has been changed to:

<assignment name=”navigation” …/>
3 David // May 28, 2009 at 3:51 pm

From Thomas Graf (via email) — Thanks Thomas!

The ConstraintNotSatisfied-error you describe in the Portlets.xml section occurs only if you set the option without an value.

e.g. <property name=”bottomLevel”>0</property>

works well after adding the value “0″.