Background: Third Party Theme Products¶

In this section, we will look at how to install a Plone theme that you have downloaded from Plone.org/products, PyPi, etc. We will also show how you can distinguish between an old-style 2.5 product and a new egg-based one.

There are two kinds of theme products: newer egg-based products, and older theme products that are in the "magical Products namespace". The type of theme product you are working with determines the steps you must take to install your theme. We'll now see how to tell the difference between the two.

Is the Theme Product Egg-Based or in the Product's Namespace?¶

First, we need to understand what egg-based means. If the theme, when unzipped, is named plonetheme.whatever, or you generate a new theme using the Paster recipe and answer "yes" to the "is this a Zope2 product", then your theme product is egg-based. On an even simpler note, if the root folder contains setup.py, it's an egg. In a typical egg-based theme product, setup.py would look something like this, where the highlighted text is the name of the egg.

                        from setuptools import setup, find_packages

version = '1.1'

setup(name='webcouturier.icompany.theme',

[...]

If the product looks like it was created using DIYPloneStyle 3.x (now outdated), it lives in the Products namespace. You can also tell that you are working with a theme in the Products namespace because there is no setup.py file in the root.

Installing an Egg-based Product¶

We recommend using buildout to install an egg-based product. You can decide whether you want to download the package yourself or leave buildout to do it for you. If the former, then follow the instructions in the previous section. If you want to leave the download up to buildout, then buildout configuration is simpler:

[configuration here]

Dependencies¶

If another package depends on the theme egg or includes its ZCML directly, you do not need to specify anything in the buildout configuration; buildout will detect this automatically. This is considered a more advanced topic. Similarly, if the theme egg depends on another product, then buildout will take care of this too.

Installing a Product if it is in the 2.x Products namespace¶

Assuming the theme product is an older 3.x theme and that it is in the Products namespace, all you have to do is place the theme product in your buildout's "products/" directory and restart your Zope instance. There is no need to rerun your buildout, because we have not changed any ZCML code.

Then, after your Zope has restarted, go to the 'Site Setup' page in the Plone interface and click on the 'Add/Remove Products' link. The 'Site Setup' area is also known as plone_control_panel, as this is the URL used to get to 'Site Setup'.

Choose the product by selecting the checkbox next to it and click the 'Install' button.

Older themes in the Products namespace may show up twice in the portal_quickinstaller, but this is a bug that is fixed in a more recent version of ZopeSkel. You can either ignore the bug or resolve it by removing this line from your theme product's configure.zcml file and restarting your Zope instance:

<five:registerPackage package="." initialize=".initialize" />

Note: You may have to empty your browser cache to see the effects of the product installation.