anthill.skinner 0.2

Skinning for plone made easy

Introduction

This package provides functionality to ease skinning of plone. It is built around the idea that you shouldn’t have to adapt much plone templates but instead take any layout you want and put it on top of Plone.

Example provided here: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/anthill.exampletheme

That means that all editing is done using Plone skin but for anonymous users (or users not having the correct permission) another skin is shown.

It resembles collective.skinny but instead of imposing customized templates for each and every content type this package tries to reuse already existing views and templates. You also won’t need a special server configuration to redirect to ++skin++ or such. With some coding it is also possible to use this for community sites because people can log in and either (if permission is set) they see the well-known Plone interface or the public skin. Also there is no need to hack around to prevent plone templates from leaking because you want to display all plone related templates as is.

This package is part of the anthill.* ecosystem that powers many websites all around the world - all being built on top of this package (originally for Plone 2.x).

Rules

Instead of having url based rules this package uses simple rules suitable for most deployments. If you don’t like these rules then you can easily overwrite them.

Rules to show public skin are as follows (order matters):

• User is anonymous

• User is authenticated but has not the correct permission (anthill: View CMS)

• User is authenticated, has the correct permission but activated preview

• There is a request variable named anthill.skinner.preview

All rules can be found in browser/handling#mustDisplayPublicSkin.

Overwrite rules

You can overwrite these rules by defining an adapter. Please keep in mind that if you overwrite rules then you need to overwrite all rules!

configure.zcml:

<adapter
    for="anthill.skinner.interfaces.ISkinHandler"
    provides="anthill.skinner.interfaces.IRuleOverwrite"
    factory="your.product.publicview.RuleMaker"
/>

publicview.py:

class RuleMaker:
    implements(IRuleOverwrite)

    def __init__(self, context):
        self.context = context

    def mustDisplayPublicView(self, context, request):
        return True

How to create your own skin

In order to create your own skin first take a look at the very simple example included in this package. It shows you how to define your menu and how content will be displayed.

Please be aware of the fact that it is intended to not load any of the css or javascript coming with Plone.

You can then create your own theme based on anthill.skinner by simply using the same skin and layer for your resources. Use anthill.skinner.interfaces.IPublicSkinLayer as the layer and publicview as the skin name you’re putting your stuff into.

Soon there will be a package called anthill.exampletheme that shows how to integrate any layout you want.

Installation

• Include anthill.skinner in your buildout.cfg

• Rerun buildout

• Restart your Zope instance

• Go to portal_quickinstaller and install anthill.skinner

• There should be a new link “Preview” on the right of your screen

Tested with

• Plone 3.3 (should work with 3.x)

Thanks

• Developers of collective.skinny

• Plone community

• banality design & communication for funding this (all anthill.* packages)

Changelog

0.2 - 2009-08-08

• Added menu generator for public views to ease menu separation and usage [spamsch]

• Fixed preview activation and deactivation link to use the current context and stick to the folder [spamsch]

0.1 - 2009-06-08

• Initial release