The Plone community is hard at work on some game-changing innovations that will redefine your notion of what is possible with a content management system.  One of the coolest elements of this is Deliverance, a new system for “theming” (applying a custom visual design) to a Plone site.

Deliverance introduces the paradigm-shifting notion of “rules based theming” in which the theme consists of a simple set of rules expressed in XML which are capable of mapping chunks of a source page (raw Plone) into sections of a fully-styled HTML/CSS page.

It’s easier to see than describe: Nate Aune put together a fantastic set of slides about Deliverance for Plone Symposium East 2009, I can’t recommend them highly enough.

Even cooler bonus: Deliverance will let us build a new generation of “point and click” theming tools like Banjo, which Nate and Eric Steele whipped up during the post-Symposium sprint.  It’s a proof of concept, not ready for primetime yet, but it’s a pretty compelling glimpse into the future of theming.

This isn’t quite “mainstream best practice” for Plone yet, but it will be in the not-too-distant future.  I for one can’t wait!

One more thing:  Because Deliverance runs outside of Plone, you can use it to theme almost any web application!  I wonder if we’ll see Drupal and Joomla adopting Deliverance someday?

H/T to Elizabeth Zimmerman.