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

[Jinshi]

Thank you very much for both of your replies. I had the thought of 
roundtrip editing of templates because of the ZPT tutorial by Limi. I 
imagined that there would be just a set of pt, css, html and image 
files, which can be loaded by designer to do the design. And later, 
developer adds some tal/metal tags to make it a plone template. 
Apparently, this is not the case.

The more I read, the better I realized that the difficulty is because we 
want to use as much features provided by main_template as possible. 
Please correct me if I am wrong, but I suppose the roundtrip editing 
would be easy if we start with main_template from scratch. Then, we can 
use designers html page as main_template and add all the tags and pull 
all the macros/slots. I know some CMS do not provide any starting 
template at all. Of course, this may not be what everyone wants (I 
certainly don't think I want to do that).

There was a proposal trying to make things easier:
http://wiki.zope.org/zope3/SiteThemes
http://www.zope.org/Members/zopepaul/zopesitethemesdiagram.png

But apparently, it is still a proposal.

Thanks for your help!
Jinshi

Espen Moe-Nilssen wrote:
> Hi
> 
> As most designer use mac, this is very easy.
> 
> 1) for example, do all the css in ploneCustom.css.
> 
> 2) open the file with external editor (after customizing it)
> 
> 3)) Use CSSEdit (on a mac) and add your sites url to it
> 
> 4) Override ploneCustom.css (this is a choise in CSSEdit)  with the file 
> you opened with external editor
> 
> 5) Edit as you do in any other program: You see the changes immidiately
> 
> 6) Save the file when you are happy (and to check it in other browsers 
> (like IE))
> 
> 
> By the way, if you bother to copy / paste the css-code, you can use 
> CSSEdit for free (but it really deservers to be paid for).
> 
> 
> 
> Den 8. nov. 2007 kl. 12.51 skrev Peter Simmons:
> 
>> 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 
>> <mailto: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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> 
> vennlig hilsen
> Espen Moe-Nilssen
> 
> 
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