[Plone-UI] Developing themes with collective.skinny

[Daniel Nouri]

We talked a bit about this on IRC.  Let me answer to this thread, too.

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 10:38 AM, Tim Knapp <duffyd at kokorice.org> wrote:
> Further questions re. developing themes with collective.skinny:
> It seems to me that you can't override cmf templates via
> collective.skinny?
>
> I've had to do quite a bit of workarounds to get simple things like
> 'search', 'navigation', 'sitemap' going. I think in the main things like
> this should really work OOTB otherwise you end up fighting against the
> 'framework' too much :(

You should be able to register views and call them just fine.  For
your view class, you'll want to inherit from the Main class and set a
page template as the "render_content" attribute.  Therein, you can
render whatever template you want to see in the "content area" of your
skin, like a search widget.

The way I use Skinny is for skins that don't have anything in common
with the Plone interface.  The Plone UI is what we call the editing
interface.  That is, we have a custom public view for all our content
types, and we also implement search by ourselves -- just because it
works very different to the search in the editing interface.  Despite
that, there's nothing that keeps you from using macros out of Plone
templates in Skinny -- but maybe they'll need a bit more context; like
provided by @@plone's globalize.  You can also use Plone's full API,
like the queryCatalog script.

fRiSi and I want to split collective.skinny into a library package and
an example package, the latter will have example implementations for
the most common things like search and sitemap, as well as the demo
skin that's now in Skinny itself.

Daniel