Skin or Components?

You’ll have noticed that you can turn any template or css file, or any directory containing these into a component. So why bother with the Skin building block?

The product created by the plone3_theme paster template does the following:

• overrides and rewrites of the standard Plone Default templates and CSS files go in the Skin section – the skins directory.
• new style sheets and images go in the Components section – the browser directory.

This manual suggests putting all your templates, style sheets and images in the Skin section - leaving just the viewlet and portlet templates in the components. There are a few reasons for this

• it is simpler to do this when you're just starting out
• it follows the way in which Plone Default is constructed
• it makes it quick and easy to adjust your theme on-the-fly after it's installed. At that point, you can make further customizations of the Skin through the Zope Management Interface.

At the time of writing there's a big discussion going on about this very question.

If you want to strip the browser resources out of the product created by the plone3_theme paster template

• remove the images and stylesheets directories in the [your theme package]/browser
• remove the <browser:resourceDirectory /> entries in [your theme package]/browser/configure.zcml
• remove the register stylesheet entry for main.css in [your theme package]/profiles/default/cssregistry.xml
• if you have already installed your product you may need to check the CSS registry in the Zope Management Interface (portal_css) and delete the main.css entry there too