Diazo theming

Description

Theming Plone and integrating external sites under one theme service using Diazo.

Introduction

Diazo is the new name of what was previously known as XDV. Diazo, like XDV, is an external HTML theming engine, a.k.a. theming proxy, which allows you to mix and match HTML and CSS from internal and external sites by using simple XML rules. It separates the theme development from the site development, so that people with little HTML and CSS knowledge can create themes without need to know underlying Python, PHP or whatever. It also enables integration of different services and sites to one, unified, user experience. For more information, you can always read the wikipedia article

Example backends to perform diazo transformation include:

  • plone.app.theming (as a normal Plone add-on)
  • Apache's mod_transform
  • Nginx web server transform module

Diazo theming can be used together with Plone, in which case enhanced support is provided by the plone.app.theming package. (This is the Plone integration package for Diazo, like collective.xdv package was the integration package for XDV) Technically, plone.app.theming adds a Plone settings panel (Diazo) and does XSL transformation in Zope's post-publication hook using the lxml library.

The community (Martin Aspeli) is currently working on an online theme editing interface, so designers can make a diazo theme for a Plone site entirely through the web. For more information, have a look at his branch of plone.app.theming.

Diazo can be used standalone with Diazo package to theme any web site, whether it's Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal or a custom in-house PHP solution from the year 2000.

Theming editing interface (backend)

The editing interface, backend, or admin site, however you wish to call it, can also be themed with plone.app.theming. If you don't want to theme the editing interface, however, you can fallback to the default Plone theme.

There are several reasons for this:

  • The Plone editing interface is powerful and has very good usability, which means that it is internally quite complex (makes complex things to pose itself as a simple to the end user).
  • The public theme you are building would not fit to the editing interface very well. E.g. no space for portlets. This is especially problematic if an external artist has created the visuals without properly fitting them for Plone.

With Diazo you can easily also have a separate admin.yoursite.com domain where the Plone editing interface is untouched.

Setting up Diazo

If you are working with Plone you can integrate plone.app.theming to your site's existing buildout.

If you are not working with Plone, the Diazo home page has instructions how to deploy the Diazo command standalone.

Diazo Rules

Rules (rules.xml) will tell how to fit content from external sources to your theme HTML.

It provides straightforward XML-based syntax to manipulate HTML easily:

  • Append, replace and drop HTML pieces
  • Insert HTML snippets
  • CSS or XPath selectors can be used to identify HTML parts
  • It is possible to mix and match content from more than two sites
  • etc.

Rules XML syntax is documented at the Diazo homepage.

The actual theming is done by one of the XSL backends listed above, by taking HTML as input and applying XSL transformations on it.

Dropping specific CSS files with Diazo

For example if you wish to get rid of the base-cachekey????.css file that comes from a Plone site, but still want to keep the authoring CSS and any special CSS files that come from add-ons: 

<drop content="/html/head[style *=
'portal_css/Plone%20Default/base-cachekey']/style" />

Benefits of using Diazo theming instead of creating native Wordpress (or other) themes

  • You need to maintain only one theming add-on product e.g. one for your main CMS and Wordpress receives updates to this site and theme automatically
  • Wordpress does not need to be touched
  • You can host your Wordpress on a different server, even wordpress.com, and still integrate it to your main CMS
  • The theme can be recycled not only for Wordpress, but also other external services: Bugzilla, Trac, Webmail, phpBB, you-name-it