[Plone-UI] How to do roundtrip theme design with graphic/web designer?

Peter Simmons cabbiepete at gmail.com
Thu Nov 8 11:51:53 UTC 2007


Hi Jinshi,

After 4 or 5 years of doing this same process I settled on having the
designer only produce a graphical mock up and whomever does the plone
integration produces all the html/css. Further refining the process I also
tried as much as possible to either use the existing elements of a plone
site or remove them. Adding new elements isn't too hard but obviously
requires all the back end programming as well. We also often found that it
was a sometimes a good approach to throw away plone's css and start from
scratch for full designs (i.e. not just changing a little bit) but to leave
the html as intact as we could. This is so we could apply css that we were
used to and leaving the html the same meant that all the javascript plone
stuff still worked. Also the plone html invariably had all the hooks we
needed for styling with css.

Others may have different takes and it really depends on the designer and
you and what skills each possesses.

Cheers,
Pete

On 07/11/2007, Jinshi Z <jinshiz at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I have a question regarding the cooperation between a plone developer
> and graphic/web designer. I just started to work on a site using
> plone3. Although I am new to plone, but I always enjoy programming.
> But I have no hope in the graphic design department. Luckily, I find
> someone who's good at that and he uses Adobe Dreamweaver for website
> design. The idea is that he produces a plain html/css template and I
> convert it into a plone theme.
>
> Here is the problem: after converted into a plone theme, it will be
> hard for the designer to change the site design again since plone
> theme essentially tear the html template apart. If he updates the
> original html template, I will have to convert the new template into
> theme again. The ideal situation would be to update his template with
> zope template tag and give him the updated template so that he can
> continue adding more bells and whistles to the whole design. But I
> don't see anyway to do that.
>
> I suppose that the idea of making ZPT xhtml compatible is to make .pt
> file editable by WYSIWYG editor. But how can designer and developer do
> roundtrip development without having to create a theme again? I
> probably miss something completely here. I am a total newbie, so
> please feel free to correct me or share your advice. Thank you.
>
> Jinshi
>
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>



-- 
Pete
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