Plone layout¶

Plone is a content management and layout system built upon the zope application server/object database. This is a very, very powerful combination. I'm pretty sure that it'll give me a wonderful productivity. I've already done some things with it and it works wonders.

You get so much for free: through-the-web editing, user management, workflow, object database. And it's all adaptable, customisable, extendable using python. One thing that kept bugging me about plone, however, was the flexibility regarding the layout of the html pages. You can do a lot with plone in a very flexible way, but I missed a good overview of which layers are stacked on top of each other. I've done some experimenting and here's my list of what's inside plone's portal_skins folder. (Plone 1.0).

Below list is loaded by plone from the top onwards, which means that if something plone needs is found in "custom", then plone won't look any further. So if you're looking for something you want to changes, just work down this list. (Yes, I'm going to do it myself, I'm in the process of moving this site over to plone).

custom

Your own set of additions/changes to the other styles.

Application-specific

archetypes

Edit and view Page Templates for archetypes.

zwiki_plone

Edit and view Page Templates for zwiki.

Plone specific

plone_ecmascript

Three utility javascript thingies. (Auto-selecting all checkboxes, displaying tooltips, calendar clicking).

plone_wysiwyg

Wysiwyg editor window.

plone_templates/ui_slots

The pieces of html (in Page Templates again) that make up all those little sidebar boxes (like the login or the navigation tree box).

plone_3rdParty/CMFCalendar

Deprecated (now in plone_templates/ui_slots).

plone_3rdParty/CMFTopic

Topic handling (don't know yet what topics are).

plone_templates

Default index_html, folder contents view, default error message, main_template (the basis for the looks of the site!), header/footer (header includes html "head" contents and the header of the site). All of this done in Page Templates. (Also included here are DTML standard_html_header/footer files).

plone_styles

CSS files. (With that horrible fixed-10pt font size thingy...)

plone_scripts/form_scripts

Python scripts for forms (called with the form parameters in order to change the values in the object, others are used to validate form parameters).

plone_scripts

All sorts of python scripts used in a site. Breadcrumbs, moving folders, logging in, etc. (Hmmm. I could overwrite the breadcrumbs script for wikis!)

plone_forms

Forms used by plone. Discussion form, reply form, login form, search form, etc.

plone_images

Icons, images (amongst which logo.jpg).

plone_content

Edit forms and views for the standard content types like images, documents, files.

CMF looks

zpt_topic

View/edit for topics.

zpt_calendar

View/edit for calendar. Includes python scripts to hop back/forward a month etc.

zpt_content

Edit forms and views for the standard content types like images, documents, files. (Mostly) overwritten by plone_content.

zpt_generic

Looks a bit like plone_forms. Login/logout Page Templates. Add objects to folders, folder contents, etc.

zpt_control

CMF default startpage, etc. Probably not used if you disable plone.

Old DTML stuff

Old dtml-using versions of the above. Can probably be removed.

• topic
• calendar
• content
• generic
• control
• Images (logo.jpg (which is the zope logo)).