[Plone-UI] Plone, Graphic Designerrs and WYSIWYG Editors

Sleepy Jackson okcomputer at aapt.net.au
Mon Jul 4 09:08:01 UTC 2005


Hi everyone,

One major limitation of Plone that I can see is that whilst Plone is CSS 
driven one cannot use a WYSIWYG editor such as dreamweaver to see What You 
Get


change the look and feel of the site.  Today, using Enfold Systems' Plone 
Desktop I was able to open up a "Plone Document" (that I had created in 
Plone) inside Dreamweaver.    Of course the WYSIWYG view in dreamweaver bore 
no resemblance to what the page truly looked like through a browser hence 
defeating the purpose of using Dreamweaver.

This being the case, how does one delegate control over site design for a 
Plone site to a graphic designer without asking them to be a Plone expert at 
the same time?  Specifically the issues in this regard seems twofold.

Issue #1
I could employ a designer to mock-up (away from Plone) a plain-html design. 
But then as I see it, it requires a fairly sophisticated understanding of 
CSS and plone skins to realise this design in Plone  (there are no tools to 
assist with this as far as I know).

Issue #2
Asking a designer to do a mockup from scratch is a lot of work.  It would be 
much easier if a designer could load (and view) a Plone skin in Dreamweaver 
(such as the default skin) and use that as a starting point to do his/her 
design.

This is a real issue for me.  In my organisation we have just rolled out 
Plone for our intranet.  However we are loathe to use it to drive our public 
website (although lord knows it needs a CMS!) because we can't afford to 
lose design control.  At this point, using Plone on our public website and 
trying to get the site to visually "sing and dance" in an environment where 
we do not have CSS experts or python programmers seems like one for the 'too 
hard basket'.

Am I missing something crucial or is this ringing true with other people?

I'd be keen to hear other people's experience and views on this.

Thanks very much

Cheers
Sleepy Jackson 






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