collective.editskinswitcher 0.2

What does it do?

Let’s say you have a Plone Site. I tested this with Plone 3. I see no reason why it should fail on Plone 2.5. Maybe it even works on a CMF site. Anyway, whatever site you have is available on two urls: www.yourdomain.com and edit.yourdomain.com. Some day you should ask your local Apache guru how he did that.

With collective.editskinswitcher installed (with the portal quick installer), visitors that go to the website with the url edit.yourdomain.com will see the Plone Default skin, which is meant for content editors. Visitors to www.yourdomain.com will see whatever skin you have set as the default skin in portal_skins. Can be pretty handy.

Developer types probably like the fact that you also get the default skin when visiting localhost and the edit skin when you go to 127.0.0.1.

But maybe you want to turn it around: your visitors should see Plone Default and your editors should see your brilliant Monty Python Skin! Ni! Just go to the portal_properties, then editskin_switcher and change the edit_skin property to your dashing theme.

Why not CMFUrlSkinSwitcher?

I looked at CMFUrlSkinSwitcher first but it had not been touched in two years. One import error (CMFCorePermissions) could easily be fixed as that import was not even used. But after that tests were failing all over the place. Theoretically always fixable of course, but rolling an own package seemed easier, cleaner and faster.

Also, CMFUrlSkinSwitcher does some more things. At least it messes around with some methods like absolute_url. It could be that I find out later that this is necessary in collective.editskinswitcher too, but currently it does not look like that will be the case.

How do I know this is working?

The easiest way to test this package in a default plone site (apart from running the tests of course), is:

• Install collective.editskinswitcher.

• Go to portal_skins in the ZMI.

• Create a new skin selection based on Plone Default. In the tests I call this Monty Python Skin, so I will use that term here as well.

• Make Monty Python Skin the default skin.

• Remove the custom skin layer from Plone Default.

• Customize the main template or the logo or something else that is easy to spot.

• Visit 127.0.0.1:8080/plonesite and you will see default Plone.

• Visit localhost:8080/plonesite and you will see Plone with your customization.

On Linux you can edit /etc/hosts and add a line like:

127.0.0.1 edit.yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com

Now visiting edit.yourdomain.com should give you default Plone and www.yourdomain.com should give you the customized Plone.

You can also let the edit urls begin with cms or manage. As long as the url is something like:

...//(edit|cms|manage).something.something....

you end up in the edit skin.

Have fun!

Maurits van Rees