Rob,

At the recent Plone Conference in Bristol, the new name 'Diazo' was 
unveiled for collective.xdv, in theory to help separate it from some 
other related technologies and to define the Plone-specific story for 
theming with the xdv approach.

The collective.xdv page on pypi.python.org has some great information on 
getting started with Diazo (formerly collective.xdv):  
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/collective.xdv

Here is a nice Diazo sprint wrap-up report:  
http://shuttlethread.com/blog/diazo-xdv-sprint-report

At the sprint, we built out a couple of working example Diazo themes - 
one is a very basic theme, but illustrates applying multiple design 
templates to your site design.  The other (orange sunset theme) example 
is an example of taking a fully complete static HTML/CSS/images site 
theme developed by someone with zero knowledge of Plone and applying 
that theme to Plone using Diazo.  It has rules for site actions, 
breadcrumbs, navigation portlet, news portlet, footer links, h1/h2 tags 
and main content, etc.

I don't believe we got as far as also having the Diazo rules pull in the 
'logged-in' Plone user experience elements, such as the edit 
bar/actions, your user actions (name, dashboard, prefs links), etc., but 
this otherwise is a nice place for you to start.

If you wanted to make things really easy on yourself at first, rather 
than creating your own package - just to get your theme working, you can 
borrow an existing package that works and add your static HTML/CSS 
images and rules.xml to it.

To do so, just download collective.examples.diazo from:  
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/collective.examples.diazo and put it into 
your buildout's /src directory.

Add collective.examples.diazo to your buildout.cfg (eggs/zcml/develop 
sections) and re-run it with bin/buildout -N

When you start up your zope instance, go into Site Setup of your Plone 
site and activate this product.  You'll then get an XDV Settings 
configlet under the Add Ons section in Site Setup.  Click on it and 
you'll see the default settings - it'll be setup to apply one of the 
provided themes (orange_sunset, I think) to your site as you browse it 
on localhost, but you can see the unthemed Plone site by using 127.0.0.1 
URLs still.  You can add additional domains to the themed domains list 
in the XDV Settings area.

Now that you have a working Diazo theme applied to your Plone site, it's 
time to develop your own.  To do so, just add a new /your-theme 
directory under the /static directory you find under the 
collective.examples.diazo package in your /src directory.  This 
directory you add should have all of your HTML theme.html pages, your 
rules.xml and your CSS and image files for your theme.

Once you get that in place, you should go back into Site Setup -> XDV 
Settings (this needs to get renamed to Diazo Settings) and specify that 
YOUR theme.html and rules.xml should be referenced, rather than the 
example that this product ships with.

You should be able to keep tweaking your rules.xml file and build out 
your theme from there.  When you get it done, you might then want to 
create your own package by using a paster script and then put your 
rules.xml and theme assets into it and use your package rather than the 
examples package, but this examples package will work for you to get going.

I recommend that you start up your zope instance with the 'fg' mode 
rather than 'start', so that you can keep changing your rules.xml and 
testing along the way without restarting zope.

Happy Diazo-ing,

Ken


On 12/4/10 4:21 PM, robb wrote:
> I'm struggling a bit with theming using collective.xdv. In my plone
> environment I have succesfully installed collective.xdv. Now I want to use a
> simple HTML/CSS theme to the plonesite.
>
> Is there anywhere some more indept explanation/tutorial how to go from
> there? Especially the rules.xml part is what I don't comprehend completely.
>
> How do I create the python package to deploy the html/css files?
> How do I register those in buildout?
> How do I use rules.xml?
>
> As you might have guessed I am not a web developer, but just a simple
> network/systems engineer, but I really would  like to get some experience
> with this. I like the stronjg features of Plone, but to be able to use Plone
> as a website/portal I HAVE to be able to manage the looks of the portal. And
> I just don't want to exchange Plone for Drupal or Joomla or something like
> that.
>
> regards and thnx in advance,
> Rob
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