I’ve cheated a bit with this one, but this is how to replace the logo of a Plone 4 site with a title and a subtitle.

First login to your Plone site and then go to the ZMI (Site Setup –> Zope Management Interface). In the ZMI browse to <site_root>/portal_view_customizations. Look in this place for the plone.logo entry.

Click on the customize button and replace the code with:

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<h1 metal:define-macro="portal_logo"
  id="portal-logo">
  <a accesskey="1"
    tal:define="portal_state context/@@plone_portal_state"
    tal:attributes="href view/navigation_root_url"
    i18n:domain="plone" tal:content="portal_state/portal_title">
  </a>
</h1>
<h2 id="subtitle">here comes the subtitle</h2>

Don’t forget to save :–)

As you can see the subtitle is a fixed string. If someone knows how to replace this with something like a portal_description variable, please let me know.

Now we have to change the css a bit: go back to the root of the ZMI and go to <site_root>/portal_skins/plone_styles. Here you click on the text of ploneCustom.css and then again on customize. A new folder will be made: <site_root>/portal_skins/custom/. Here you find the ploneCustom.css. In this file add the following overrides:

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#portal-logo {
  display: inline-block;
  margin: 0 0;
}
#content .documentDescription, #content #description {
  color: #000000;
  font: 1.25em "Helvetica Neue",Arial,FreeSans,sans-serif;
  margin-left: 0;
  margin-top: 10px;
  margin-bottom: 10px;
}
#portal-header h2#subtitle {
  color: #666666;
  font: 1.25em "Helvetica Neue",Arial,FreeSans,sans-serif;
  margin-left: 10px;
  margin-top: 0px;
  margin-bottom: 10px;
}
/* fixed-width layout. *
#visual-portal-wrapper { width: 60em; margin: 0 auto; }

After this edit the logo region of your site should be altered.

For changing the footer, go into the ZMI. Here you find the footer template in the <site_root>/portal_view_customizations folder.

Edit the plone.footer file to something like:

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<div metal:define-macro="portal_footer"
  i18n:domain="plone"
  class="row">
  <div class="position-0 width-full cell">
    <div id="portal-footer">
      <p>
      Designed by <b>G Rossen</b> | <a href="http://rossen.be">r o s s e n . be</a>
      </p>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

This should change your footer to the above text.

This is what i did to change the favicon of my Plone 4.1 website.

First login to your Plone site and then go to the ZMI (Site Setup –> Zope Management Interface). In the ZMI browse to <site_root>/portal_skins/plone_images.

In this folder click on favicon.ico and choose customize.

A copy of the favicon will now be placed into the <site_root>/custom folder.
As title choose something like “My favicon” and upload your favicon.ico file.

This should give you the new favicon.

It all started with WordPress…

After WordPress i migrated to Drupal, Sypmhony CMS, Textpattern, MODx and now this site is running Plone.

While it has a steep learning curve, Plone is doing out of the box what i want for this site, unlike the other CMS’s where i needed a lot of plugins/addons/extentions.

Textile markup, richt text editor, multimedia handling, integrated search, photo albums, … all included.

One aspect Plone really needs to improve though, is theming. For simple designs, like this site, you can quite easily override some of the CSS, but advanced styling means deep diving into the bowels of Plone and Zope. Or as an alternative: using a theme transformer such as Diazo or Deliverance.

Coming next: some small guides how to adapt the standard Plone install and theme into something similar to this site.

Don’t get me wrong, Drupal was – and still is – a fine tool to create many kinds of websites, but the lack of good themes was bothering me. So i had two choices: keep searching for a nice Drupal theme or creating one myself, which meant that i had to get my hands dirty on things like CSS, Drupal api’s,…

So, why not take the big splash and learn something completely new. I was always interested in technologies like XML and XSLT, so i was delighted to find a CMS which is build around this standards: Symphony CMS.

So far it has been a great ride, most of the functionality of the old Drupal and Wordpress versions of this site has been migrated and i have finally found a framework which makes it very easy to seamless include services like Twitter, Flickr and Last.fm.

The travelogue pages have their pictures restored… All links are working again…

I still think for a single user blog or website Wordpress is better & far easier to configure, but it was a nice experiment and so far I really like Drupal.

Wordpress features I’ll miss a lot:

• automatic updates of plugins and core
• NextGEN gallery
• themes

Drupal features I really like:

• Views module
• Image_Field module

I’m migrating my old Wordpress site to a Drupal based one. Currently there are a lot of broken links, images are not appearing and the theme could use some improvement.

So far i’m quite impressed with the possibilities and features of Drupal, although working with inline images and albums seems a bit clumsy (something like the NextGEN Gallery module for Drupal would be very much appreciated.

If you downloaded the D2X modes from Nikon you may have noticed the noise at ISO 400 or even ISO 200. Many people seem to use D2Xmode1 for portraits and D2Xmode3 for nature and landscape photography. Someone on the dpreview.com suggested to use the following settings:

• Picture Control: Neutral
• Sharpening +6
• Contrast +1
• Brightness -1
• Saturation +1
• Hue +1

The result is simply stunning. Nearly no noise anymore, even in heavily cropped images, perfect detail and colours.

It seems like Sun made a right choice hiring Ian Murdock. I installed OpenSolaris last night in a VMware Fusion instance, and it looks sweet: bash is the default shell, seperate /root home directory, live cd which acts as a install cd, ZFS, Xen, DTrace, Containers, a new package management system IPS. Now if only Sun could do something about the lack of hardware support.

For more info and downloads: go to http://www.opensolaris.com