The Custom Style Sheet and Base Properties¶

You can do a great deal by simply overriding Plone's existing styles. There's a stylesheet available for just this purpose.

You'll find an empty stylesheet called ploneCustom.css in

[your products directory]/CMFPlone/skins/plone_styles or
Site Setup > Zope Management Interface > portal_skins > plone_styles

This stylesheet is always loaded last on a page, and can be used, therefore, to override any other styles. There's an excellent and comprehensive tutorial on this here:

http://plone.org/documentation/tutorial/working-with-css

DTML¶

You'll see that ploneCustom.css has a .dtml extension, and the CSS inside is wrapped in

                        /* <dtml-with base_properties> */
 .......
/* </dtml-with> */

                      

DTML is another Zope templating language, which in this case is deployed so that particular variables can be picked up from a properties sheet (base_properties.props) - for example:

                        #portal-column-one {
    vertical-align: top;
    width: <dtml-var columnOneWidth missing="16em">;
    border-collapse: collapse;
    padding: 0;
}

                      

We wouldn't recommend using this technique as it is likely to be phased out, but it is as well to know that it is there. You can sometimes get caught out if you're customizing ploneCustom.css and accidentally delete the top or bottom "dtml-with" statement, or forget to add the .dtml extension.