About the ZPT_CSS_THIN CoreBlog skin Authors: Mike Malloch, Alexander Lesnikov, KnowNet ltd, Wales (mike@theknownet.com) Contact: mike@theknownet.com Version: 0.1 - this version is preliminary; it should work, but it excludes a number of features about to appear soon in a new version Installation Unpack the tarball. The skin is distributed as a .zexp zope-export file. Import this into the 'skin' directory of a coreBlog to make it available there. Then go into the CoreBlog's skins tab and choose the new skin from the drop-down menu. If you do not know how to import the .zexp file, see 'Instructions for importing the .zexp' at the end of this read-me. Features 1 - Cleaner rendering architecture using ZPT The CoreBlog dtml rendering architecture is complicated and hard to modify. This skin replaces all of the dtml files with a few zpt files and macros, making it much easier to modify the way a blog is rendered into markup. 2 - Cleaner, more 'blog-like' markup CoreBlog's default markup is messy, table-based, and very difficult to style effectively with Cascading Stylesheets (CSS). The ZPT_CSS_THIN skin delivers much tidier, modern semantic markup, which makes it easy to change the layout and look with CSS. We chose to deliver a dom structure very similar to that delivered by default by Movable Type (MT). This means that default MT stylesheets can be used to style a coreBlog without modification 3 - Pure CSS skinning of layout and appearance We have included several alternative stylesheets to illustrate the value of modern html and css (you can hot swap among them when viewing the blog by using the drop-down menu at the top-right of the blog) There should be no need to change anything in the html-rendering of a coreBlog in order simply to change the way it looks. This can all be done using nothing but CSS 4 - Blog-this-page bookmarklet View the skin/ZPT_CSS_THIN/get_blogThisPage_bookmarklet page for instructions on using the blogThisPage bookmarklet. The bookmarklet is a convenience tool that allows you to quickly create a new blog entry about any page you are viewing in your browser. Features available when installed in a CMF/Plone site The zpt templates which generate the blog pages will look for some particular Plone folders to use for navigation and blogroll links. (If these folders are not found, no navigation or blogroll links will be rendered out). To make use of this feature, place the coreBlog inside the user's folder in Members, and make a folder structure - also in the user's Members folder - as follows (or just import the blogsupport.zexp skeleton structure into the user's Members folder) plone_site Members this-user the-CoreBlog blogsupport toplinks ( these will display at the top of blog pages ) sidelinks ( these will display in the sidebar of blog pages ) The user can then manage their own navigation(top) and sidebar links through the Plone interface Adding or changing stylesheets Inside the ZPT_CSS_THIN folder there is a subfolder called 'styles'. Each style is a subfolder of the styles folder, in which you can place or modify the main stylesheet (style.css) and any images used by the stylesheet. Note that we have included 2 images in the default iBlogish style. Just change those images to the ones you want, or modify the stylesheet. Instructions for importing the .zexp To make the .zexp file available for importing into your Zope instance, either place it in the file system's zope import directory on your zope server, or - if it is available - use the Quick Importer product, which allows importing from remote file systems. To make the skin available in a coreBlog, go to the 'skin' directory of the coreBlog instance in the ZMI, and click the 'Import/Export' button at the bottom of the skin-directory listing page, or choose 'Quick Importer' (if this is available) from the drop-down menu at the top-right of the ZMI listing page. Use the import interface