XDV Theme Chooser

This week I started working on a Plone product to make it easy to install and select themes for collective.xdv.

The plan is that theme designers will be able to distribute xdv themes as .zip files containing all the necessary html/css/image files and a working rules.xml file. Then to install the theme on a plone site the only thing a site manager will need to do is get the url to a theme's .zip file, and the product will magically download and install the theme in their plone site and configure collective.xdv to use the new theme.

The product is currently called uwosh.xdvchooser and is available in our svn repository: https://svn.it.uwosh.edu/svn/plone/Projects/uwosh.xdvchooser/trunk/

This product is still very much in development and is not ready for anyone to use. In order for the product to work at all it requires patching dv.xdvserver to allow storing rules.xml files in the zope instead of on the filesystem.

If anyone has comments/suggestions or wants to help out then let me know!

~~ Marshall Scorcio <marshall dot scorcio at gmail dot com>

Use Cases

would it be correct to say that your solution is for installing general Plone themes into a Plone site without touching file-system 

In our discussions that was a very important goal, because our campus hosts many sites centrally using only a few Zopes and we do not want to have to grant themers (who may not be IT staff) file system access on the servers.

The other feature we'd like to see get into Plone somehow is a better way of viewing, browsing, and then installing themes.  Drupal theme installations are really painless and their theme galleries include nice screenshots and let you search by Drupal version compatibility, both things we have not had in Plone.  Since presentations we've seen on Deliverance mention oswd.org, which makes themes available in zip files, that seemed to be a good model for what to expect.

And, once those themes are installed, having a way of editing them through the web seems ideal!