Theming

To understand Plone's theming story you must first understand the technology stack on which it is built (or not built).

Zope2

Old style

Zope2 is the oldest portion of the stack. It offers technologies like Acquisition (among others) which facilitate the reuse of objects such as page templates amongst a website full of "content" objects.

CMF

Old style

Next came The Zope Content Management Framework (CMF); it offers technologies like file system directory views (FSDV) and skin layers (among others). The CMF allows people to manage their website's CSS, JavaScript and image resources on the filesystem, typically inside a "skins" directory.

ZTK

New style

Initially called Zope 3 (more or less), the Zope Toolkit (ZTK) is a set of reusable packages (including zope.component and zope.interface which provide the Zope Component Architecture) that bring a modern, scalable development environment to Plone.

Diazo

New style

Born out of a desire to separate Python package code from website resources like CSS, JavaScript and images; Diazo (orginally called XDV) is a technology that maps Plone content to an XHTML template, based on an XML ruleset.