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

Jinshi Z jinshiz at gmail.com
Mon Nov 12 21:50:20 UTC 2007


Espen,

If an addon with all the features you described here, it will be
fantastic. But I can certainly settle with something less. My project
involves just me and another guy, too. I don't think he will be glad
to know he has to deal with plone template or modify his template to
fit in a plone css. I think I will go with the route Pete suggested to
leave the graphic mockup alone and do integration for all the
html/css. Maybe along the way, I may find something to make the whole
process easier. Maybe I can modify the main_template and let it to use
the macros defined in the graphic mockup.

And thank Pete for your comments on the template.

Jinshi

On Nov 12, 2007 9:11 AM, Espen Moe-Nilssen <espen at medialog.no> wrote:
>
> When working on my SubSkins project I have done this a bit of thought.
>
> As my company is just me and one more there is no way I can develop the
> product that "lay-out etc" should have been.
> If there are anyone else  that have the resources (or sponsors) I will be
> willing to join a team.
>
> This is how I have been thinking about it.
>
> 1) We need a control panel for the layout or even better: a template that
> can be editet "on-line".
>     I was thinking something like
>     a) defining (that is, choosing from whats available) the "main portions
> of the page, like header, footer, left slot etc.
>     b) Defining what goes into each "parts". Hopefully, product would have
> some way of register so designers could choose like this: I want search,
> logo, breadcrumbs in my #portal-top, or breadcrumbs, logo, global-nav.
>     c) The skins-making /css-writing should be much more "object-oriented",
> it would for examle be nice to select an object (like the global-nav) and in
> a separate window be able to edit the css that affected that object (without
> opening several css-files
>     d) ZMI "scares a lot of designers
>
> Please give feedback, as I have to finish some work now......
>
> ... hopefully to be continued..
>
>
>
> Den 9. nov. 2007 kl. 23.35 skrev 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
> Grieg Medialog A.S
> Vaskerelven 8
> http://medialog.no
> Tlf. 55 32 82 90
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> vennlig hilsen
> Espen Moe-Nilssen
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Grieg Medialog A.S
> Vaskerelven 8
> http://medialog.no
> Tlf. 55 32 82 90
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>




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