Customizing Plone's Look and Feel

The welcome page of Plone looks like the figure below

On a Plone site, you'll see three columns to a page by default: the left, middle, and right columns. The middle column contains the content for the object being currently viewed. This is where most of the user functionality is for adding and editing content, completing forms, and so on. The left and right columns contain a series of boxes that display information. Each of these boxes is called a portlet.

To access this, go to the ZMI, ensure you're on the root Plone site, and click the properties tab. This opens a list of properties, including left_slots, right_slots, and document_action_slots as shown in figure below.

The left_slots properties refer to portlets shown on the left of the page, and the right_slots properties list the portlets shown on the right of the page. The portlets are shown in the order, from top to bottom, that they're listed in the properties.

To customize the left and right slots of the portal, we need to change the portlets in the corresponding slots.

Changing the default page

In Plone you can define a list of pages that will be looked up to be rendered as the default page. The default pages are index_html, index.html, index.htm, and FrontPage. You set the list of pages in portal_properties/site_properties/default_page property, one name per line as shown in the figure below. When the default page is looked for, Plone will look for each page in that list, starting with the first until it finds one that matches. If you'd like to change the value for a folder only, you can access the folder through the ZMI, click the properties tab, and then add a new list property called default_page.