Use and development of your product

Use valid name for your product

A products which name starts with a digit won't be installable in Plone, even if you see it registered as a Zope product in the ZMI in Control_Panel > Products.

Empty all caches (!!)

If the changes you applied to the product don't show out the way you planned, or if some skin elements persist after you uninstalled the product, make sure that either the browser and the front-end proxy caches (apache, squid) are emptied, and reload the current page.
In Firefox, press shift while clicking the reload button. In IE, use the key combination <Ctrl-F5>.
Do not underestimate this possible issue, it covers at least 60% of the problems that you may encounter with a skin product (based on DIYPloneStyle or not).

Beware of any TTW customization

Some of your product skin elements might have been customized from within the ZMI, and be overridden by their equivalent in the custom skin layer. This one also covers a lot of the possible problems you might experience.

Uninstall your product before renaming its elements

If you forgot to do so before renaming stylesheets or javascripts, you can resolve conflicts from the portal_css and portal_javascripts tools in the ZMI.
If you didn't uninstall the product before renaming it or the skin selection, revert your changes on the filesystem, uninstall the product and rename the elements again.

Check that the product is loaded in Zope

From the ZMI, go to /Control_Panel/Products/manage_main and check that the product is listed and not marked as broken.
If it's not listed you should double check the product installation on the filesystem, making sure that the user who launches the Zope server has at least read access on it.
If it is marked as broken, you should check your error log and make sure that your business python code is valid (this should only happen if you added a broken Python class definition to your initial skeleton Plone style product).

Make sure that the product is installable in Plone

If your product is not listed or is marked as removed in Site Setup > Add/Remove Products or in the Quick Installer (portal_quickinstaller in the ZMI), it probably means that you have to debug the module Extensions/Install.py.

Use the provided testing framework

DIYPloneStyle comes with basic unit tests.
Follow the links from the Resources chapter of this tutorial if you care about learning the Plone Unit Testing Framework.

Use of the generator script

Check that the script uses the right python interpreter

Thank you Casper R. Nielsen for suggesting me to add this point.
With unix like systems, you can run the script by calling it directly, omitting the python command. If you get the error bad interpreter: No such file or directory by calling the script that way, it's because the first line of the script refers to a file that does not exist.
To make it run without error, you can either:

• prefix the shell command by the python command

  $ python generator.py --productname CustomSkin

  or by the full path of the python interpreter. For instance:

  $ /usr/local/bin/python generator.py --productname CustomSkin

• edit the first line of the script to make it point to your python interpreter.

Check that the script is executable

If you get the error Permission denied by calling the script directly (under Linux/Unix), there are big chances that the executable bit was removed from the script file permissions. You can either run the script by prefixing the command by a python call (see previous paragraph) or use chmod to restore file permissions:

      $ chmod 0755 generator.py

Check that you have the needed write permissions

If you get a traceback that looks like this one,

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "DIYPloneStyle/bin/generator.py", line 226, in ?
    generateDirectoryCopy( path, path.replace(DIYPloneStyle, productname) )
  File "DIYPloneStyle/bin/generator.py", line 182, in generateDirectoryCopy
    os.mkdir(dstDirectory)
OSError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: /Users/david/plone-instance/Products/CustomStyle/
    

it is probably because you don't have write permissions on the folder where DIYPloneStyle resides and where the new product will be created.

Get Further support

From the Plone community

Before adding a comment to the manual, please post your question/issue on the plone-users mailing list or try to get some support on the IRC #plone channel.

From the DIYPloneStyle product authors

Feel free to contact DIYPloneStyle authors by sending them an email (email addresses appear in the product README.txt file).