Creating The Website Skin

Unless you have worked on other software that utilizes the concept of skins, the concept may be a bit confusing at first, but it is all rather simple once you get started into it. The following are some important skin facts:

• A skin is basically a special folder that holds your customized logo image, style sheets, page templates, and other design elements we will be learning about over the next dozen or so lessons.
• Skins can be easily switched on and off, so it is not unusual to have several different skins for a site, maybe to give a client some options to choose from.
• A skins and the files inside it are easy to copy, modify, and reuse.
• Making changes to the site design by using a skin is pretty fail-safe, as it is easy to switch back to the Plone Default skin in case you really mess something up and can't see your site properly (remember you can always get into the ZMI, even if you can't see the Plone site anymore due to a big mistake on your part).
• Learning to make skins and cool websites in Plone is fun.

Working Through The Web (TTW)

In this lesson we are going to create a skin using the through the web (TTW) method, which means everything will be done using the ZMI in a browser.

Note that there is another way, a bit more complicated, using folders and files that must reside on the file system of the server or PC where Plone is installed. The skin is installed as a Plone Product. The TTW method is easier to understand for the beginner and works just as well as the file system method.

To get started you need to bring up the ZMI in the browser.