(Read more interesting articles on Plone here.)

Creating a theme package with ZopeSkel

Now that we have examined someone else's theme, let us try creating our own.

Remember, we will not cover theme creation in depth; this is only a sample for site administrators (who may or may not be required to develop themes, in addition to managing their site).

For more information about creating themes, Visit: http://plone.org/documentation/kb/how-to-create-a-plone-3-theme-product-on-thefilesystem.

To create a theme, we will use the ZopeSkel tool (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ZopeSkel) to generate some of the boilerplate code. ZopeSkel uses PasteScript (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/PasteScript) to facilitate package generation using a set of templates.

Other options include:

Write everything by hand from memory

Copy the contents of another theme package

Use another tool such as ArchGenXML to generate boilerplate code (http://plone.org/products/archgenxml)

Adding ZopeSkel to a buildout

Now let's add ZopeSkel to our buildout.

In 03-appearance-zopeskel.cfg, we have this:

[buildout]
extends = 03-appearance-zopepy.cfg
parts +=
zopeskel

[zopeskel]
recipe = zc.recipe.egg
dependent-scripts = true

We extend the previous working configuration file, and add a new section called zopeskel.

This section uses the zc.recipe.egg recipe (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/zc.recipe.egg) to download ZopeSkel from the Python Package Index (zc.recipe.egg will search the Python Package Index for packages that match the section name zopeskel).

We set dependent-scripts to true, to tell Buildout to generate Python scripts for ZopeSkel's dependencies such as PasteScript, which includes the paster script.

Now stop Plone (with Ctrl + C or Ctrl + Z/Enter) and run Buildout:

$ bin/buildout -c 03-appearance-zopeskel.cfg

You should see:

$ bin/buildout -c 03-appearance-zopeskel.cfg

Uninstalling plonesite.

Updating zope2.

Updating fake eggs

Updating instance.

Installing plonesite.

…

Updating zopepy.

Installing zopeskel.

Getting distribution for 'zopeskel'.

Got ZopeSkel 2.16.

Getting distribution for 'Cheetah>1.0,<=2.2.1'.

…

Got Cheetah 2.2.1.

Getting distribution for 'PasteScript'.

Got PasteScript 1.7.3.

Getting distribution for 'PasteDeploy'.

…

Got PasteDeploy 1.3.3.

Getting distribution for 'Paste>=1.3'.

…

Got Paste 1.7.3.1.

Generated script '/Users/aclark/Developer/plone-site-admin/
buildout/bin/
zopeskel'.
Generated script '/Users/aclark/Developer/plone-site-admin/
buildout/bin/
paster'.
Generated script '/Users/aclark/Developer/plone-site-admin/
buildout/bin/
easy_install'.
Generated script '/Users/aclark/Developer/plone-site-admin/
buildout/bin/
easy_install-2.4'.

You will notice that in addition to bin/zopeskel, Buildout also installed the "dependent scripts" bin/paster and bin/easy_install (the latter of which we do not really need in this case).

Running ZopeSkel

Now try running ZopeSkel with the command:

$ bin/zopeskel

You should see:

Usage:

zopeskel <template> <output-name> [var1=value] ... [varN=value]

zopeskel --help Full help

zopeskel --list List template verbosely, with details

zopeskel --make-config-file Output .zopeskel prefs file

...

This tells us we need to pick a template and output-name.

ZopeSkel goes on to list the available templates. They are: