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Recently it was announced of the first release of a free Plone theme, designed and developed by Quintagroup: Python Reel, your Free Responsive theme for Plone 4.2.x that holds a great promise to become even more popular than well-loved Schools and SunRain, all-time favourites among Free Plone Themes.
Let’s see, if those expectations can actually live up to become true in today’s mobile-dominated web.
At first glance design-wise Python Reel gives off that animalistic vibe that is so in for 2013, presenting the graceful styling inspired by the shape of snake. But, it’s much more softer take on a serpent, with pastel colors and elegant typography Python Reel is suitable for most business/personal websites. Still, Python Reel is not so simple and gentle as it may look.
To start off, Python Reel features Responsive Web design to present itself with grace on any device, be it a small smartphone, a tablet or widescreen HD PCs. Take a look at the website on touch phone, 7-inch tablet, iPad:
As you see, the whole content is resized and repositioned to be more device-appropriate. 2013 is considered to be a year when mobile web usage will finally overtake PC’s. It’s crucial more than ever to have your website mobile-ready. Fully responsive Python Reel satisfied all those requirements, coming also with mobile-first navigation and touch-enabled carousel.
Mobile users are often looking for immediate answers; they want the information and they want it now. Simple responsive navigation won’t do, it will just take up an entire mobile screen, without actually showing much. Python Reel has a native support for quintagroup.dropdownmenu product that transforms multi-level navigation into an elegant responsive drop-down menu, built following mobile first approach.
With a simple responsive menu you get all menu items listed at the top, which is quite messy. Mobile-first navigation looks as a select box that triggers a pop-up with the complete multi-level navigation menu.
Having a carousel slider on your Plone website is not a big deal, but making it responsive to smaller devices, meaning tablets and smartphones is a completely different story. In Python Reel just with a few clicks you can have an elegant image slider that is not only scalable, but can be positioned in the top area or just below the header.
Now, let’s look under the hood, Python Reel is powered by Compass framework built on top of Sass. So, unlike most Plone Themes this one is coded in another, cleaner fashion. CSS templates are well-structured and reusable, thus making maintenance and deep customization easier as well.
This is where themes like Python Reel come on stage. Python Reel let’s you set your header images with the logo that comes in a light and dark versions. The theme will allow you to set the colors of your navigation menu, including the text info. Write your own slogan. Instead of one picture, create a carousel and change its background to match overall color palette on your website. Fortunately, the theme is rather friendly with the user, changing colors is just a matter of changing its html number.
With such a combination of features, you can quickly create a good looking home page that looks like it was built by a professional designer.
One of my favourite features in Python Reel is the columns settings. The columns section will allow you to set up to three columns. You can have your content on the left with a portlet on the right, flip that around, have portlets on both sides, adjust their width or even remove them altogether. ContentWellPortlets extension in turn let you add portlets to any page section header, footer, content. This way Python Reel theme will display a number of page layouts that allow each page to be individually customized without additional code. This allows for quick creation of multiple page designs within the site.
Python Reel would not be mobile enough without social media to share the content and connect with your visitors on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin; keep them up-to-date with the latest news in RSS.
After spending several hours playing with Python Reel on plone-demo, I can say it is a pretty solid theme. Seeing Python Reel only on pics doesn’t really do it justice though. You’ll need to switch on your imagination. There is little to nothing you couldn’t customize in this theme with proper tools and knowledge. So you need to try out this theme for yourself and get a real feel of what Python Reel has to offer, how easy it’s to personalize and how great and versatile it can look.
Lastly, let’s cover support. All Plone themes are not made equal. Some, like Python Reel, are flexible and can be used for virtually any purpose. This is great, but sometimes the options can be overwhelming. As for Python Reel all customization instructions are provided in README.txt. But if there are some things you don’t fully understand or have trouble with, you can always open the ticket. Downloading for free Python Reel you get a solid product that will continue to receive updates as well as support into the future.
Overall, I really like Python Reel and think this Plone theme can fit most business fields really well. It’s easy to set up and customize, plus it responds to your viewer’s device. Python Reel gives you plenty of options, but at the same time, not enough to overwhelm you. What I love most about this Plone theme in particular is how flexible it is. It can be used for websites ranging from single-column to 3 column responsive sites. This theme could be your ticket to mobile market.
You can download Python Reel from:
Homepage: http://themes.quintagroup.com/product/python-reel
Plone.org: http://plone.org/products/python-reel-plone-theme
Pypi: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/quintagroup.theme.pythonreel
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Want to make your website easy to browse on a mobile device and engage more visitors? You are on the right way - not only does Quintagroup suggest responsive Plone themes, but we also can offer two of our responsive themes for free - SunRain and Schools. It means one more benefit on behalf of Quintagroup - there are not so many free responsive Plone themes, while using our design services enables you to download and implement them to your mobile website.
Apart from the usual functionality, design customization and bright palette of colors, you can stop bothering about usability of the mobile version of your website. Responsive themes enable your website to widen the list of visitors by engaging users browsing the net more and more often on their mobile devices.
Responsive approach to our themes is based on CSS3 media queries that help easily switch between different layouts in order to accommodate for different screen sizes. You won’t have to wait while your mobile device is ‘thinking’ over loading your website that was primarily designed for desktop browsing, you won’t have to zoom it to see some tiny icons or buttons (because, for example, primarily they were designed for desktop browsing). Responsive themes ensure accessibility of your content and simple mobile-oriented navigation.
So, ‘fresh up’ your website with responsive Plone themes and make it more appealing to your users.
Functional and interesting design of the free SunRain Plone Theme created by Quintagroup with two different views depending on your taste and needs - Sun and Rain - is now also available for mobile devices. Click on the screenshot to find out more about its key characteristics.
Got interested and want to download? Follow this way:
Adaptable and functional free Plone Theme designed by Quintagroup team has now become responsive. Click on the screenshot to find out more about its key characteristics:
If you want to see how our SunRain and Schools themes can be implemented in practice, you may browse the following websites and check presently available solutions:
You may also go to plone-demo.quintagroup.com and kill two birds with one stone - not only does it give you an opportunity to try working with Plone, but also deal with the themes themselves. Follow the instructions to log in as Plone administartor, then go to the ‘ploneadmin’ dropdown menu in the right upper corner, choose ‘Site Setup’ button, find ‘Diazo theme’ icon under ‘Plone Configuration’ settings and choose the theme you’re interested in. This will help you make up your mind quicker and prompt you to contact us for further details.
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Quintagroup has recently launched a new version of our Plone Demo website, where you can see and feel Plone CMS at first hand.
Admin demo account can be used to log in and, thus, get the experience of a true Plone user. You will be able to add content by creating pages, folders, events; move content between site sections; manage workflow for every content item by publishing or making it private; and much more.
Apart from out-of-the-box Plone features, you can try several Plone add-ons in work. These are:
Plone demo site also has Quintagroup diazo themes for Plone installed. There are 15 themes right now, they are all very different and include a bunch of theme-specific features. You can try any of the installed Plone themes right now by following the instructions on Plone Themes page. Enjoy Plone new look!
]]>The following are feature list for most popular Quintagroup free themes:
There are also TechLight, Lite and EstateLite free diazo Plone themes that are ready-to-be-used on your Plone 4.1 site.
All our themes use Plone 4 logo that is customizable as in default Plone via ZMI portal_skins/sunburst_images/logo.png. Themes' footer is also editable as in default Plone: via portal_view_customizations/plone.footer.
We also included improved thumbnail display view (switch to Thumbnail view for this) for all themes.
All themes were tested with such popular Plone products as: Products.Carousel, Products.ContentWellPortlets, Products.LinguaPlone, and quintagroup.dropdownmenu. We added special styles to make our themes look nice with these products activated.
Themes can be installed into buildout via adding theme name into eggs section of buildout.cfg file, rerunning the buildout and restarting instance. Then activate theme via Site Setup -> Add-ons and enjoy!
Please, feel free to contact us any time with any feedback or improvement suggestion. Thank you for using our products.
]]>The theme includes 2 different views: default 'Rain' and 'Sun' (can be activated via ZMI) - click the following screenshots to see full-screen images.
Theme comes with Static Stylish portlet, that allows to add specially-styled text portlets: 'Green Item' and 'Grey Item'. Apart from setting portlet background color, such portlets has portlet text of different size. This allows creating portlets with important information which will easily be noticed by site users. Static Stylish portlets also include special styling for portlet links.
The theme is tested with Portlet Cumulus that allows adding Tag Cloud portlet to Plone site.
SunRain theme has 'subscribe' viewlet integrated, that adds 4 actions 'Share on Twitter', 'Share on Facebook', 'Send this' and 'Subscribe to RSS'. You can set necessary icon links as simply as editing corresponding portal_action items in ZMI. You are also able to hide/show items that you need.
SunRain Theme uses customizable slogan and replaceable logo.
You can freely install and customize SunRain Plone Theme on your Plone 4 instance right away. Simply add quintagroup.theme.sunrain to eggs and zcml sections of your buildout.cfg file, rebuild it, restart your Plone site, and activate the theme via Site setup -> Add-ons.
We decided to use SunRain theme on a new version of our corporate blogging site - TalkQuintagroup, that has just migrated from Plone 2.5.1 to Plone 4.0.7. The theme suits perfectly our blogging purposes because it has special blog and blog listing views styled for collective.blogstar and Products.Quills.
We would be very grateful if you inform us about Plone site(s) that use our SunRain Theme, so that we add it to the list of live websites with Quintagroup Plone Themes.
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Collective.embedly allows to embed videos, images and other rich media to Plone by simply adding external links that are converted into embeddable content. The approach here is to use the Transform machinery to replace the URL with embed code by calling the embed.ly API.
There are more than 200 services that support embed.ly service. With collective.embedly it becomes very easy to insert content from those websites simply by proving object URL. Embedly-supported serices s include such video sharing sites as Youtube, Blip.tv, Vimeo; such audio streaming services as Grooveshark, SoundCloud, last.fm; such image/photo stocks as Flickr, and many other: GoogleMaps, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
To embed media from any of the embedly-supported external resources to Plone - follow such instructions:
For more illustrative instructions - see collective.embedly documentation. You will find how-tos on embedding videos to Plone from YouTube, blip.tv, vimeo and TED.com websites there. Also see how to embed images from Flickr, how to embed map from GoogleMaps, how to embed audio from SoundCloud, and how to embed content from Facebook to Plone.
Screenshot on the right dislays how can a page with different embedly-converted content look in Plone 4. collective.embedly works in Plone 4.
collective.embedly is compatible with Plone 4. It is distributed as a Python egg and can easily be installed into your buildout as other packages for Plone.
Visit the following pages to find more information about collective.embedly:
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quintagroup.dropdownmenu is a successor of qPloneDropDownMenu product, but we took different concept of creating menus as a basis for our new package. Starting from Plone 3, when portal_actions introduced CMF Action Category containers, an opportunity to build nested actions trees was opened.
While developing our new product we decided to use that portal_actions feature. Thus, quintagroup.dropdownmenu builds drop-down menu through the web from a tree of nested Category Actions and Actions within portal_actions tool. Since CMF Action Category does not behave as a regular action and it has different set of properties, we introduced convention in quintagroup.dropdownmenu that requires to have a specially named Action for each Actions Category.
Apart from building drop-down menu on the basis of portal_action items, quintagroup.dropdownmenu allows to generate it on the basis of site structure. This is governed by settings in the Drop Down Menu configlet. There you can also define whether:
quintagroup.dropdownmenu is compatible with Plone 4 and Plone 3. It is distributed as a Python egg and can easily be installed into your buildout as other packages for Plone.
Visit the following pages to find more information about quintagroup.dropdownmenu features, usage and installation:
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In this screencast we also describe how to register Plone site in Google Webmaster Tools area, how to validate it and submit Sitemap.
Quintagroup Analytics Tool allows to see Plone site content from different perspectives. Presenting site's statistic information in different statistic views, quintagroup.analytics allows to visually audit Plone content.
Information generated by Quintagroup Analytics can be very useful while migrating your site into newer Plone version. With its help you can audit the content in Plone site before migration and compare it with the migrated website structure.
quintagroup.analytics is now compatible with Plone 4 and Plone 3. But we plan to test it on Plone 2.5 and Plone 2.1 soon: you may expect a new product release for earlier Plone versions in the nearest future.
You can install quintagroup.analytics on your Plone 4 or Plone 3 instance by adding quintagroup.analytics to the buildout (see detailed installation instructions). Having activated Quintagroup Analytics via QuickInstaller in Plone you will see a new Quintagroup Analytics item appeared under Add-on Products Configuarion.
Quintagroup Analytics configlet consists of several tabs that present different statistics about your Plone site. Every chart is followed by a table, presenting all statistic data in numbers:
So, what statistics can you have by using Quintagroup Analytics?
Visit the following pages to find more information about quintagroup.analytics features, usage and installation:
]]>To begin with I would like to announce that one of our most widely used products - quintagroup.seoptimizer is now upgraded to work with Plone 4. Its 4.0 version doesn't bring any new functionality but allows to use it on Plone 4 - based sites.
Another popular product quintagroup.plonegooglesitemaps has gone through a number of updates and its 1.3 version, released on June 01, comes with several new features for New Sitemaps. News Sitemap created by a new 1.3 version of quintagroup.plonegooglesitemaps is now generated according to the new News Google Sitemaps specifications.
There are some specific meta tags (such as <n:access>, <n:genres>, <n:stock_tickers>, etc.), required by new Google Sitemaps standard, that are not available in Plone's default NewsItem content type. That is why starting from 1.3 version quintagroup.plonegooglesitemap brings special additional configuration menu to NewsItems for defining NewsSitemap-specific meta tags.
Such additional configuration menu is added only to News Item content type by default quintagroup.plonegooglesitemap settings since News Sitemap is expected to include News Items only. But if needed, this configuration menu can be added to other content types (if you plan to include them into the News Sitemap). See instruction for making this on News Google Sitemaps documentation area.
Please note: Starting from this release to install quintagroup.plonegooglesitempas you will have to to add 'quintagroup.plonegooglesotemaps-overrides' line to your buildout's ZCML area. See detailed Installation Instructions.
Together with quintagroup.plonegooglesitemaps 1.3 version, we released 0.7 version of quintagroup.canonicalpath. So, please consider updating these two packages.
collective.referencedatagridfield - is a completely new package, that is a mix of Reference and DataGrid fields for Plone. It allows to add external sources (as well as internal) as related items to Plone's objects. Custom titles can be set to the related items instead of their real titles. Also it allows to easily change related items order.
The package's aim is to help Plone developers to extend default Plone Reference field functionality or override existing Reference field functionality with a custom one. It does not bring this functionality to the Plone content types, but allows Plone developers to do that simply by following the example content type creation.
More about collective.referencedatagridfield
The first one to present his report was Serhiy Valchuk who talked about New Features of Plone 4. He mainly concentrated on functional and UI improvements that Plone 4th version brings: new items in Plone Control Panel, Image Handling options, TinyMCE visual editor overview and new features in portlets management.
Then Olha Pelishok presented her Overview of Calendaring add-ons for Plone. She provided many screenshots and illustrative examples of the following products usage on Plone 3 websites: CalendarX, Plone4Artists Calendar, zopyx.multieventcalendar, and vs.event.
After that Ihor Berehuliak started his Search Engines Optimization of Plone sites report. He spoke a lot about peculiarities of SEO for Plone sites. Ihor described main reasons that have influence on search results and how to improve Plone site SE crawling with default Plone tools and with the help of quintagroup.seoptimizer, quintagroup.plonegooglesitemaps, quintagroup.canonicalpath and Redirection Tool add-ons. A big part of presentation was devoted to work with Google Webmaster Tools and robots.txt in standard Plone site. Also, Ihor made some suggestions about what is needed to be improved in Plone in terms of SEO
The last one to present his ideas was Myroslav Opyr, whose speech was particularly interesting for Quintagroup's developers team. Myroslav talked about automating of development process, testing and Plone sites administering: Continuous Integration, Bitten, Code Review, Fabric, RSS/Jabber, etc.
Photos from World Plone Day 2010 in Lviv are available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/quintagroup/sets/72157623955266658
]]>We decided rewrite seo configlet using standard Plone configlet approach. SEO configlet was divided into 2 parts: base and advanced (see images below). So, all settings that used to be listed on one page before are now split for clearer and easier use.
Also, several features available in previous Plone SEO releases were dropped in 3.0 version:
Global keywords functionality is no longer available - no more settings to control keywords behaviour.
Additional keywords field used to for content types to receive additional keywords from the ones manually-specified was also dropped in this release.
Apart from cleaned-up code, rebuilt translation, and updated tests, quintagroup.seoptimizer 3.0 has significant performance issues fixes. Also, all metatags lists moved into htmlhead viewletmanager. More information about new Plone SEO release available in Plone SEO 3.0 Change Log.
Also, consider visiting Plone SEO Documentation area for detailed information about quintagroup.seoptimizer configuration.
If you are using quintagroup.seoptimizer for yours projects please update it. We would be glad to get your feedback about our work and particularly about Quintagroup Search Engine Optimization Tool. Leave a testimonial for us to know that you use and like our product. If you have any suggestions about future product development - don't hesitate to share your ideas.
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