Introduction

Plone has a strong culture of customisation. That is, virtually every aspect of Plone can be customised or overridden, without touching the original source code. This tutorial will outline the main ways in which visual components in Plone 3 can be customised by developers.

It is possible for site administrators to customise various templates through-the-web, using either the portal_skins tool (for traditional CMF skin layer resources) or the portal_view_customizations tool (for Zope 3 views, viewlets and portlets). We will explain the difference in more detail on subsequent pages. Through-the-web customisation is fine for quick fixes or experimentation, but this is no way to build or deploy a serious project. This tutorial focuses on filesystem-based customisations, as a developer would do in a third-party add-on product.

This tutorial demonstrates the main types of customisations using a package called example.customization. The buildout tutorial will show you how to install it in our buildout.

If you simply want to look at the latest version of the source code, you can browse for it in the Collective Subversion repository.