(Read more interesting articles on Plone here.)
Examining themes in the Zope Management Interface
Now that we have seen in part how themes work, let us take a closer look at their representation in Zope Object Database (ZODB).
Browse to http://localhost:8080/Plone. Click on Site Setup Zope Management Interface| and you should see:
This is a Through the Web (TTW) representation of all the objects in the database at the Plone site level (the application root is one level above).
The most frequently used theme-related objects here are:
- portal_css
- portal_javascripts
- portal_skins
- portal_view_customizations
Of these, portal_css and portal_javascripts are most often used to enable their respective debug modes, wherein the CSS and JavaScript files are not compiled into a single file (not to be confused with Zope 2’s debug mode which detects filesystem changes in real time when enabled).
Take a look at your site with Firebug, in particular the style tab.
You should see:
Now enable debug mode in portal_javascripts and look again. You should see:
When portal_css debug mode is enabled, we can see (or by viewing the HTML source) that the CSS files are loaded individually in Firebug.
The same applies to portal_javascripts debug mode.
This can be absolutely invaluable when trying to correlate various visual elements with their respective sources.
In addition to debug mode, you can also add CSS/JavaScript files to their respective registries through the Web, which brings us to the next topic.
