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.
Jon,
After Nate gave this talk at the European Plone Symposium, I gave a case study talk on a project we are doing using Deliverance and some other custom WSGI middleware pieces to theme an existing legacy .NET portal. And Plone. And Moodle.
Slides here:
http://www.slideshare.net/hammertoe/lipstick-on-a-pig-european-plone-symposium-2009
-Matt
Beautiful, Matt! It is fantastic to see the rubber hitting the road with this approach.