Jumpstart Your Theme Development Using Paster¶

The quickest and most efficient way to get started is not to create your theme product folders and associated files from scratch, but to take advantage of a product generator which will automatically create the framework for a theme product based on your responses to a few interactive questions.

Using Paster on Your Local Machine¶

For users more comfortable using the command line, you are more likely to use a tool called ZopeSkel and the paster templates it contains. ZopeSkel is a collection of PasteScript templates which can be used to quickly generate Zope and Plone projects like buildouts, archetypes products and, most pertinently for us, Plone themes.

Please refer to this manual page for up-to-date instructions how to include Paster with ZopeSkel templates in your Plone configuration. Plone Unified Installer should ship with a working Paster command.

Create your Theme Product¶

If you have paster and ZopeSkel installed, navigate to the directory where you'd like to create your product (we'd recommend [your buildout]/[zinstance|zeocluster/src]) and run from the command line:

$ bin/paster create -t plone3_theme plonetheme.mytheme

or, if you have paster in your Plone installation:

                          $ [path to your buildout]/python-[version]/paster create -t plone3_theme plonetheme.mytheme

                        

This will initiate a series of questions by the paster script. The defaults are largely appropriate for your first theme, so in many cases you can simply hit return. Here is example output from the interactive session.

                          Selected and implied templates:  ZopeSkel#basic_namespace  A project with a namespace package  ZopeSkel#plone            A Plone project  ZopeSkel#plone3_theme     A Theme for Plone 3.0Variables:  egg:      plonetheme.mytheme  package:  plonethememytheme  project:  plonetheme.mythemeEnter namespace_package (Namespace package (like plonetheme)) ['plonetheme']:Enter package (The package contained namespace package (like example)) ['example']:mythemeEnter skinname (The skin selection to be added to 'portal_skins' (like 'My Theme')) ['']:My ThemeEnter skinbase (Name of the skin selection from which the new one will be copied) ['Plone Default']:Enter empty_styles (Override default public stylesheets with empty ones?) [True]: FalseEnter include_doc (Include in-line documentation in generated code?) [False]:TrueEnter zope2product (Are you creating a Zope 2 Product?) [True]:Enter version (Version) ['1.0']:Enter description (One-line description of the package) ['An installable theme for Plone 3.0']: Enter long_description (Multi-line description (in reST)) ['']:Enter author (Author name) ['Plone Collective']:Enter author_email (Author email) ['product-developers@lists.plone.org']:Enter keywords (Space-separated keywords/tags) ['web zope plone theme']:Enter url (URL of homepage) ['http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/']:Enter license_name (License name) ['GPL']:Enter zip_safe (True/False: if the package can be distributed as a .zip file) [False]:

                        

You cannot use 'delete' to correct a typo during the interactive session. If you make a mistake, ctrl-c to stop the script and start over.

Paster Options¶

Some of these questions warrant further explanation:

Enter namespace_package: It is good practice to use the 'plonetheme' namespace for your theme. You can use other namespaces, of course ('products' might be another), but unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise, use 'plonetheme'.
Enter package: The 'package' is simply the lowercase name of your theme product, sans spaces or underscores.
Enter skinname: The 'skinname' is the human-readable name for your theme. Spaces and capitalization are appropriate.
Enter skinbase: In nearly all cases, you'll want to leave this as 'Plone Default'.
Enter empty_styles: Answering 'True' will cause empty stylesheets to be added to your product which will override the default base.css, public.css, and portlets.css included in any Plone site using the 'Plone Default' skin. 'False' will not add empty stylesheets. For the purposes of this practical, we recommend entering 'False'.
Enter include_doc: Answering 'True' will cause inline documentation to be added to the files created by ZopeSkel. It is worth doing this at least once, as some of the documentation is quite useful.
Enter zope2product: Answering 'True' means that the package will be useable as an egg, it will be listed in the ZMI, skin folders will be registered as layers with the Skins Tool ('portal_skins'), and the Generic Setup profile for the product can be loaded via the Setup Tool ('portal_setup'). We'll explore some of this further; for now, suffice to say that you'll always want to enter 'True' here when generating a Plone theme.
Enter zip_safe: Stick with the default here.

Creating new eggs and packages quickly with paster

How to use the paster command to create new packages with proper setuptools- and egg-compliant filesystem layout quickly and easily.