[Plone-UI] Developing themes with collective.skinny

[Tim Knapp]

Hi Daniel,

Thanks a lot for the clarification on this. I actually worked out the
fact that I can use any 'stuff' in the acquisition chain after I sent
this email (bit dense I guess ;). I had also gathered things need to go
through the 'main.Main' view class but thanks a lot for the
clarification on the 'render_content' attribute, very helpful. (As
discussed on #plone) I've developed a couple of fairly involved
collective.skinny themes now and will post a message to the mailing
list/my blog when they're live as well as my 'war stories' :)


Here's some interesting figures from ab for a collective.skinny theme VS
a standard plone site:

Standard Plone:
Requests per second:    3.27 [#/sec] (mean)

collective.skinny theme (with some heavy customisation):
Requests per second:    7.46 [#/sec] (mean)

Another collective.skinny theme (simple brochureware site):
Requests per second:    12.23 [#/sec] (mean)


Thanks again for an excellent package!

-Tim

On Mon, 2009-05-04 at 21:28 +0100, Daniel Nouri wrote:
> 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