What's new in Plone 2.0 - For Designers
Restructured templates
The templates in Plone 1 have be refactored for Plone 2, resulting in a less complicated and more granular structure. It is now much easier to understand which template to change, and understand what effect of changing a template will be.
For highly customized sites designed using the Plone 1 model, some refactoring of your customized templates may be neccessary to bring them in line with Plone 2.
More control in CSS
CSS controls even more of Plone's interface and appearance than before, making it possible to radically change the design of a Plone site without changing any of the default templates.
In addition, as before, to make basic changes, like color schemes, fonts, borders, etc., while retaining the same look, there is a set of simple properties that can be customized without even touching the CSS directly (to maintain compatibility with older products and sites, the former version of this object, "stylesheet_properties", has been kept, and the new object, "base_properties", has been added.
Plone 2 includes a stylesheet for our previous, deprecated CSS from Plone 1 ("ploneDeprecated.css"), allowing use of older products or customized sites for easier transition.
Standard or tableless CSS
By default, Plone 2 runs with our standard CSS file, which is broadly compatible with browsers. For sites with more controlled deployment who want to take advantage of true semantic web markup, there is a "tableless" CSS mode that uses no tables—even for the basic page structure. With tableless mode, even more radical changes can be made by just changing the CSS, including changing the overall page structure.
Action Icons
Plone actions, such as "print this page" and "My Folder", can have an icon designed to display with them, allowing designers greater control over appearance of site, without having to embed these image tags directly in templates.