Designing Plone themes - resources for designers?

Hey there Ploneverse,

Our small Plone team find that we have mixed results when working with external designers to theme Plone sites.

Does anyone know of any existing public resources focused on designing for Plone? Most of the theme documentation I have come across is focused on what's going on under the hood / the technical implementation aspects of Plone theming & Diazo.

  1. What do you do when working with designers?

  2. What things are useful to include in a design brief specific to Plone?

  3. What kinds of examples / resources do you provide to display the different elements of a standard Plone site?

Is there a wider use case for this kind of documentation?

Any suggestions / insights are appreciated. :smile:

Our solution (meaning my company) is a methodology called "Gloss". Gloss provides a base Diazo theme which you use as a starting point for your designs. It has many rough edges but it certainly has sped up our production of themes. More details here:
http://the-gloss-project.readthedocs.org/

Whoever is doing the theme integration for you will find benefit in using the Diazo Snippets Library which is a collection of commonly used Diazo Rules. See blog post:
http://blog.dbain.com/2015/04/the-diazo-snippets-chrome-extension.html

As far as documentation is concerned here was my first attempt at a theming guide:


It should be useful at least for academic/reference purposes.

Please, please ask me more questions about these resources, especially Gloss!

I have put a lot of work into this, but as many other things, it stopped.

The (short) story is like this:

  1. I wanted a base skeleton, and decided that bootstrap was a good start.
  2. Work had already been done on : diaxotheme.framworks, so I decided to use that.
  3. I made a zopeskel template (feel free to port it to mr. bob) https://github.com/espenmn/zopeskel.diazochildchildtheme which will give you a bootstrap theme with: ../bin/zopeskel diazochildtheme diazochildtheme.mychildtheme

This work 'OK' for Plone 4 (basically, you get this: https://github.com/espenmn/medialog.childtheme )

I then discovered that no old themes work for Plone 5, so I tried to port it.
.... then everything went bad.

Anyway: I tried to remove the confusing (at least for designers) diazo rules, and rather use:
https://github.com/collective/collective.themefragment (which let you use TAL among other things)

I was hoping to add a theme or two for Plone 5 when it ships, but right now it is on halt:

Along the way, I made https://plone.org/products/medialog-dexterityview and https://plone.org/products/medialog-iconpicker with a long time plan that one day: it is possible to 'mock it all up TTW'