Suggestions for Plone Themes

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21

I suggest you begin with main elements (header, footer, columns), then go for either the test_rendering page or the portlets layouts (calendar, search, login, navigation). There are several variations of those, some may have images displayed, others have popups of their own, e.g. live search. Also there are many states like hover, active, active+hover, open, children (children hover, active, active+hover), input boxes placeholders etc. Not to mention modals (login ones for example) and other not so immediate interfaces.

You'll spend lots of time getting to know all those important UI variations from Plone, that's why it's important to have a base theme standing asap. So you can lose time in such details.

22

I suggest GSOC focus on one standard theme without integrated addons or zcml views but making use of plone.app.themingplugins for custom views if needed. Overrides via z3c.jbot should be none or minimal because they tie the theme to specific Plone versions. You can use LESS Extend to absorb Bootstrap styles, don't try to incorporate them via Diazo, like in http://widerin.net/blog/turbo-twitter-bootstrap-theming-for-plone-using-diazo

OTOH it'd be nice offer users a suggestion of a few selected addons which would get styled automatically, webcouturier.dropdownmenu being the most prominent.

23

I am stuck between using external js or keeping all files with the theme. I request the community to give a feedback on this.
External js files are generally minified resources that don't give expected results when executing in plone control panel.

1 Like
24

From my point of view, you should deliver all necessary resources locally from your site - not from third party sites. As you cannot know which privacy policies are in effect in the environment of your visitors.

E.g. when I noticed that starting "Firefox" immediately opens an HTTP connection to Google, I banned connections into the Google empire via firewall rules. Thus, I would not be able to load external resources available from Google.

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25

Makes a lot of sense. Another scenario might be a Plone based intranet which does not have internet access. So I would give a +1 for local resources over external ones.

26

Maybe take a look at the default theme of Drupal 8, it has all the features needed on a CMS, including a toolbar very similar to the Plone one, but built with much less, let's say, Less :wink:
(and almost no js)
In the whole the Drupal default theme is functional and very fast and a good starting point to further customizations.

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27

Ever had visited a website that never loads, or only half loads just because some piece of css / js / ads are stuck somewhere on a distant CDN...?

28

No, never visited one.[quote="JotaMG, post:27, topic:1707"]
Ever had visited a website that never loads,
[/quote]

For the record I was not talking about site that never loads but the sites that take more time to load!

But am sure that we all must have visited sites that take some time to load images/videos stuffed on homepage, like some bulky backgrnd image etc. We dont need that type of themes(thats what i think). I am certain now that i wont be using external js or images etc in the themes i design.

29

You could use CDNs and write a JS fallback pointing to local copies so you get the best of both worlds: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12575203/how-to-fallback-twitter-bootstrap-cdn-to-local-copy

There's an issue with that however. The easy way would be to directly point the fallback to a local copy in your theme's static resources directory. That would work but you'd skip registering that copy into Plone's Resource Registry and thus lose the built-in "bundle/meta-bundle" conveniences, most prominent being avoiding loading say Bootstrap twice if another plugin (or Plone itself) also registers it. Most up to date documentation (that is, for Plone 5.0.3) is here: https://github.com/plone/documentation/blob/plip-1277-meta-bundles-generation/adapt-and-extend/theming/resourceregistry.rst (will soon be merged and made available in http://docs.plone.org/adapt-and-extend/theming/resourceregistry.html)

I don't currently see a way out of that so it seems safer to forget CDNs for now if you don't want to risk duplicating resources.

OTOH you could begin with CDNs (+unregistered local fallback) so that gets you started quicker and later on try / ask for help on registering all the Plone resources & bundles stuff.

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30

Even www.template.co has certain material designs that can be used for further customisations.

31

I still prefer using local resources than writing fallbacks to self. BTW thanks for the suggestion.

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32

To follow up on the Opinionated Theme (uh) theme...
I start with the assumption that an opinionated theme gets you 90% of what you need to run a certain type of site. So really it is a standard theme plus added functionality.
Here are some possible options that I think could work, I would expect a student to target ONLY one for the summer... thoughts?

Opinionated Theme Hitlist

  • Restaurant
  • Blog
  • Magazine
  • Review Site (Product and Service Reviews)
  • Job Board
  • Club or Community site (would be great for say a Python User Group)
33

I'd add:

  • Corporate website (About Us/Products/Team/Contact)
  • Intranet (similar to corporate but less generic, more community/sharing/action oriented)
  • Single Page Application: I wonder if we could provide TinyMCE templates and styles to enable editors to build & reorder generic Sections with fake text and buttons, e.g. adventurega.me - Informationen zum Thema adventurega.)
34

Sorry for repeating myself, but I have been trying to do this for the last 6 months...

  1. the medialog.bergensiana theme has most of what that theme has (I need some help with LESS)
  2. It adds 'more parts' which you can choose between (remove those you dont want
  3. I try to add alternative rules files and CSS (or less if I get that to work) which can be selected from the control panel

giving you http://tvedt.medialog.no and http://texmo.medialog.no and http://www.medialog.no ++ basically from the same theme.

  1. The 'one page theme (medialog.fullpagetheme)' is supposed to be based on the bergensiana theme and is supposed to work for 'full folder view / all view' or certain URLs, giving you something like http://www.okologisk-honning.no (some modifications, I have this theme if someone needs it)

  2. To 'design' the fullpagetheme, I have been trying to use mosaic and collective.cover (without luck) and I also tried to make another content type (not working): https://github.com/espenmn/medialog.fullpagebehavior.

In other words: it kind of works now, but it difficult to edit the 'page parts'.

PS: the themes needs to be checkout of from github AND INSTALLED (from the control panel)
You also need to checkout : https://github.com/espenmn/webcouturier.dropdownmenu (I dont think the one on Pypi works with Plone 5)

1 Like
35

I do need to check that out.
Will see if I find time this weekend.

36

I also like the idea of corporate website, since there are so many products and sites are getting launched every day. As @pigeonflight have already said on many occasions, focus should be on design part so that it doesn't look like just another free template site.

37

Thanks, I hadn't noticed your previous messages on the subject. That's a great solution, I'll look more into it. Otoh, would you agree the TinyMCE approach (templates+formats/styles) could get less opinionated? For instance we could be less rigid with the site's folder structure. Do you think it'd work?

For Bergensiana I'd go for Mosaic or Cover as you mentioned. What problems did you have? You'd have to create a Cover layout, register Cover styles or maybe create some tiles to address styles. Also probably populate them with example content. I haven't used Mosaic recently, and not yet on production, but Cover seems fine.

38

@pigeonflight and everyone, I just shared my proposal for new theme pack. I know it's late for review still if you can manage to provide last minute feedback it would be nice.

Here's the proposal.

39

Yup.... I'm seeing it.

40

collective.cover and mosaic are both great, but I was thinking that this would raise the learning curve for new users, and that they will have to install more add-ons just to test a theme. (maybe this is not true).
With mosaic: I did not manage to get menus and navigation without manually adding it, maybe a 'navigation tile' could be an idea ?