I'm pleased to announce the 1.0b1 releases of Diazo and plone.app.theming.

Diazo is a theming tool that implements a Deliverance like language using a pure XSLT engine. Diazo 1.0b1 brings a number of language simplifications when compared to XDV, for instance we now use <replace theme-children="..."> instead of the confusingly named <copy theme="..">. We have also added operations to support the copying, deletion and merging of attributes.

While Diazo is developed as part of the Plone project, there is nothing Plone specific about the package. Diazo 1.0b1 includes a WSGI middleware component which may be used as a simple proxy, see the quick start guide. Themes may alternatively be compiled down to XSLT and run in Apache or Nginx, for more information see the deployment guide.

Diazo is the successor to XDV and in most cases is able to run your existing XDV rules without changes. For more information on Diazo see the documentation at diazo.org. Download from the diazo pypi page.

To use Diazo in a Plone site, we recommend plone.app.theming. plone.app.theming is the successor to collective.xdv. It builds on the newly released plone.resource to simplify the process of theme deployment and distribution, themes are no longer required to be a python package and may be distributed as simple zip files.

plone.app.theming adds the ability to pass parameters to your theme from calculated TAL expressions, enabling conditions to be tested in a python context which is generally simpler than XPath.

To get started with plone.app.theming read the documentation. It is recommended to use with Plone 4.1b2, the package version known good set is available on good-py. It should be possible to use with 4.0.x with appropriate pins for plone.app.registry and plone.app.z3c.form and dependencies.

Special thanks to Martin Aspeli and David Glick for their work on plone.app.theming, plone.resouce and Diazo.