Customizing Plone

Introduction

Plone can be customized in two different ways, depending on which kind of component you are trying to change:

  • Through-the-web.
  • By add-on products.

You should never edit files directly in an egg folder. Instead you usually create a customized version of the item you wish to modify and then configure Plone to use your customized version instead of the stock one.

Through-the-web changes

Minor configuration changes can be done through the web. These changes are effective immediately and don't require you to write any code or restart Zope application server. The downside is that since through-the-web changes don't have a source code "recipe" for what you did, the changes are not automatically repeatable. If you need to do the same changes for another site again, or you need heavily modify your site, you need go through manual steps to achieve the same customization.

Possible through-the-web changes are:

  • Site settings: E.g. adding/removing content rules
  • Showing and hiding viewlets (parts of the page) using @@manage-viewlets
  • Exporting and importing parts of the site configuration in portal_setup
  • Customizing viewlet templates in portal_view_customization
  • Customize portal_skins layer theme files in portal_skins
  • Uploading Javascript files, CSS files and images through Zope management interface and registering using portal_css and portal_javascripts

Through the code changes

To expand Plone using Python, you have to create your own add-on product. Add-on products are distributed as packaged Python modules called eggs. The recommended way is to use the bobtemplates.plone command to generate an add-on product skeleton which you can use as a starting point for your development.