Daniel Nouri's Old Blog

Plone 3 theming done the conventional way is very painful. There are countless blog posts that tell this story. Catherine Williams' recent post is one of them.

An often overlooked alternative to creating a nice looking site based on Plone is rolling your own, completely separate skin. Once you hook up your own skin, you can forget all about viewlets, ZCML, GenericSetup, and theme away, leveraging your knowledge about HTML, CSS, and ZPT.

In a reply to Catherine's post, I'm explaining the most important aspects of rolling your own theme from scratch, along with some code to get you started. Look for my comment titled Roll your own public-facing skin, it's much easier! :-)

Edit: I made a new post and another one related to this with an extensive example package called collective.skinny.