Same Theme, Different Resources

Once you have your static resources set up to be delivered by a webserver like Apache, you have the power to apply variations to the same theme for different Plone sites.

Set up your Sites

To try this out, add a second Plone site to the root of your Zope Management Interface. Install the Theme Transforms Add On and, via Site Setup - Theme transform, add the same domain, theme and rules as your first Plone site.

Next, assuming that your static resources live in a folder on your hard disk called staticresources, edit the entry in the Absolute URL Prefix box in Site Setup - Theme transform to read:

http://localhost/staticresources/greensite/

Finally, go to your original Plone site and edit the Absolute URL Prefix box on that site to read:

http://localhost/staticresources/redsite/

Set  up your Theme

Now, make the links to your static resources in your theme file relative rather than absolute. 

href="test.css"

Turning to the staticresources folder on your hard disk, add a folder called greensite and drop a test.css file into it. Then add a folder called redsite and drop a slightly different version of test.css into that one.

Tweak Apache

You'll need to tweak Apache so that both sites can be seen through http://localhost. Follow the instructions in the variations section of Apache on your Mac to make a slight change to the rewrite rules in the httpd.conf file. Don't forget to restart!