Theming With Deliverance

Deliverance is a middleware tool that maps web page content into an HTML design. It essentially moves elements from a content page into placeholders in the design, without touching either. The design can be static HTML/CSS files local to Deliverance, or a live site anywhere on the internet. The content can come from Plone or any other CMS or web application. The mapping between content and design is expressed in an XML-formatted rules file. This process is illustrated in the following diagram.

For more information about Deliverance, see Jazkarta’s slide presentation Theming websites effortlessly with Deliverance.

Theming a Plone site with Deliverance has many advantages:

• Greater flexibility - It offers total flexibility for placement of elements on the page.
• Per section theming - Different theme rules and designs can be applied to different sections of the site.
• No Plone theme products - It eliminates the need to create and maintain a custom Plone theme product.
• Shorter learning curve - Web designers do not need special Plone knowledge, the  HTML/CSS that they create can be used directly. Plone creates well structured HTML pages (especially Plone 4), so content rules are usually straightforward using CSS selectors as identifiers.
• Easy theme adjustments - Because the site theme is driven directly from standard HTML and CSS, it is straightforward for a web designer with only those skills to adjust the theme.
• Faster page load time - Pages are rendered faster (in spite of the middleware step) by optimizing the CSS and JavaScript needed to render a page.
• Easy mashups - Pages can be created that pull in content from disparate sources, effectively creating a dynamic “mashup” without the need to write custom code. This can be used, for example, to visually integrate an external blog or shopping cart into the Plone site.