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

Sat Nov 10 09:43:34 UTC 2007

Hi Jinshi,

Yes if you start main_template from scratch the round trip engineering
should be easier. But (and its fairly big) you then have to integrate any of
the plone functions you want into your template. Also if you use any 3rd
party add-ons they will be following the plone way to do things so you will
need to re-integrate your designers css into those and/or get the designer
to allow for them.

It means you have more control but obviously more work.

Cheers,
Pete

On 09/11/2007, Jinshi <jinshiz at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
> >>
> >>     _______________________________________________
> >>     UI mailing list
> >>     UI at lists.plone.org
> >>     <mailto:UI at lists.plone.org>
> >>     http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ui
> >>     <http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ui>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> Pete
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> UI mailing list
> >> UI at lists.plone.org
> >> <mailto:UI at lists.plone.org>
> >> http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ui
> >
> > vennlig hilsen
> > Espen Moe-Nilssen
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Grieg Medialog A.S
> > Vaskerelven 8
> > http://medialog.no
> > Tlf. 55 32 82 90
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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-- 
Pete
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