Moo's Ruby Red

A visual skin for Plone 2.1
Version 1.0.3

Copyright

Copyright 2005 Mikko Ohtamaa. This product is based on DIYPlone 0.2 product (installer code), copyright David Convent and Martin Aspeli. The orignal author of the default background image is Architetto Francesco Rollandin, the image taken from www.openclipart.com.

Purpose

Moo's Ruby Red skin gives reddish look for your site, with a bit heavier touch than Plone's default skin. There are no layout changes. The color world is especially suitable for social democratic sites ;)

The base color is Ruby Red (r153 g0 b0) and other colors have evolved around it. To see details, check skins/rubyred/base_properties.prop file. Some icon graphics is redrawn to be more suitable for the skin colors. Colophon (the lowest information bar with compatibility logos) is also hidden by default.

Outlooks

Basically all colors are changed to be reddish.

• Changed background and foreground colors in most elements 
• Tweaked coloring based on a workflow state 
• Recolored some icons 
• Redesigned some icons
• Added a new destructive icon 
• Added a new logo, changed how logo is rendered 
• Hid colophon (the bottom bar of a page with various useless logos = )
• Changed footer message 
• Region content background has a fixed background image

Requirements

• At least Plone 2.1.1.
• Tested with Plone 2.1.1, othet versions might not work

Installation

1. Extract RubyRed to your Plone/Data/Products directory 
   • If your Zope instance is under a special user (on Unix) you need to switch to this user before unpacking the archive.
   • Example how to extract files as user zope: sudo -u zope tar -xzf /tmp/RubyRed-1.0.1.tar.gz  
2. Use Plone quick installer to install the product. Remember to hit reload in a browser.
3. Now skin should be deployed site wide. You can check that Moo's Ruby Red appears in portal_skins Properties tab.

Customizing

• You need to change customize global_logo.pt and footer.pt files with your own logo and copyright texts.
  1. Go to Zope Management interface, choose Plone -> portal_skins
  2. Choose Ruby Red
  3. Click either footer, logo_animated or logo_text. The logo is divided to two parts. You can disable the other part if you can have logo in one piece.
  4. Click customize
  5. Now you can edit your custom items in portal_skins/custom folder

References

Moo's Ruby Red is in live usage in www.opensourceusability.com.

Quality assurance

The skin is tested with:

• Plone 2.1.1 (Plone version 2.1.1 or higher is required)
• Zope 2.8.1 
• Windows XP
• Linux (Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy)
• IE 6.0
• Opera 8.5
• Firefox 1.0

This version doesn't work with Plone 2.1.0. If you need to run Plone 2.1.0 use release Moo's Ruby Red 1.0.1.

Issues

With version 1.0.1:

• Icons: Some icon images don't always seem to change immediately after you switch a skin. This is some caching issue I haven't yet been able to solve.
  • Icons are accessed using CSS background-image element
  • Restart Zope
  • Restart your browser
• Some color definitions might not yet been updated for the new skins. Please report them to me.
• Some default Plone icons assume they are drawn on white background and when they have darker background, there are some ugly edges. This could be fixed by redrawing these icons. 
• Button rendering problems with IE: widths are not right. This also happens with Plone 2.1 default skin.
• History collapsion trigger uses background color instead of being transparent, thus drawing a block over background image if a browser window is too narrow. 
• History collapsion trigger icon is not correctly aligned in IE. This also happens with Plone 2.1 default skin. 

History

This skin was orignally designed for my usability issue tracking site. The creation of the skin took about five man days. I consumed 3 x 1,5l Pepsi Max as fuel and didn't sleep for three nights :)

If you wish to hire a professional Plone developer (freelancer), please don't hesitate to contact. I am willing to work abroad.

Contact

If you wish to hire a professional Plone developer, please don't hesitate to contact me. I am willing to work abroad. Curriculum vitae here.

Mikko Ohtamaa

Oulu, Finland

miohtama@mail.student.oulu.fi

Changelog

From version 1.0.2 to version 1.0.3

• Fixed: Sitemap item borders were broken
• Fixed: Live search label was rendered white on white

From version 1.0.1 to version 1.0.2

• Fixed: Plone 2.1.1. changed portlet_navtree_macro.pt. Incompatibility issue broke Plone 2.1.1 site
• Fixed: Icons higher than 13 pixels are now propeply rendered in folder's item listing.

From version 1.0 to version 1.0.1

• Fixed: Linux installation was broken. Tar-files were lacking proper acces rights (a+rx), because they were created on Windows. release.sh was fixed to make proper rights.
• Fixed: Archetypes field "(required)" word was invisible (white on white)
• Fixed: Changed CSS media from all to screen
• Fixed: Document first heading color
• Fixed: Code examples background color
• Enhancement: Kupu toolbar buttons look better
• Enhancement: release.sh script was tweaked a bit to be more general.
• Updated this readme file.