The following points are relevant for collective.xdv 1.0b4.

The installation instructions here seem to work OK, but I recommend using Plone 3.3.* or greater.

Debug versus Production Mode

Everything will work properly in debug mode, but I've found a couple of issues in production mode. So check your work without debug mode on before you deploy it.

1. In production mode, I found I needed the complete path to my theme and rules file, rather than the path relative to your instance.
2. In production mode, multiple themes on multiple Plone sites didn't work, unless you tweaked the code (see below)

Multiple Themes in a Single Plone Site

If you want to style up a section of your site with a different theme from the main theme, then you can do this with the alternate themes option in the themes transforms set-up screen.

The following will style up a news folder at the root of your site

^/news(/.*)?$ | [path to theme file] | [path to rules file]

The following will style up any news folder at any point in your site

^.*/news(/.*)?$ | [path to theme file] | [path to rules file]

Multiple Themes for Multiple Sites

This is when you have a number of Plone sites in the same Zope instance, and you want each to have a theme of its own. You can only really experiment with this if you're prepared to set up Apache in front of your development instance, set up a few virtual hosts and edit the hosts file on your computer. On a Mac this turns out to be not too difficult.

• The basic instructions are here.
• There's a dashboard widget for editing your hosts file (HostsWidget).
• A rough and ready VirtualHost entry to copy at the bottom of this page.

(you'll have to do this anyway to deploy multiple sites in production - though my instructions are for a rough and ready development instance only)

You'll also need to tweak the code a bit (note if you're running in foreground mode or debug mode, you won't see the need for this tweak - but you'll soon see the point when you turn debug off).

Go to collective.xdv.transforms (you'll find this in buildout-cache/eggs at the top level of your plone installation).

At line 128 - add the line in bold

      for domain in domains:
            if domain.lower() == host.lower():
                found_domain = True
                domain_name = domain.lower()
                break
        if not found_domain:

At line 155/6   
        theme = settings.theme
        rules = settings.rules
        theme_id = u'default%s' % domain_name

You'll need to restart to incorporate these changes. They are just a hack - keep an eye on collective.xdv releases to see if this gets fixed.

Rough and Ready VirtualHost Entry

On a Mac you'll find a ready-made .conf file which automatically gets included in the main Apache httpd.conf here:

/private/etc/apache2/extras/httpd-vhosts.conf

The following assumes that

• you've assigned www.site2.com to 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file (or using the HostsWidget)
• you've got a Plone site in your zope instance called site2
• you've set Zope to listen at 127.0.0.1 on port 8080 (that's the default set up anyway)

Insert the following below any VirtualHost entries that are already there.

<VirtualHost *:80>

    ServerAdmin webmaster@yourunit.ox.ac.uk

    ServerName www.site2.com

    ProxyRequests Off

    # allow to connect to localhost with port ending with 80 and 90

    # the having at least 2 digits before the 80 or 90

    <ProxyMatch http://localhost:[0-9]{2,}?[8|9]0/.*>

        Order deny,allow

        Allow from all

    </ProxyMatch>

    # Enable/disable the handling of HTTP/1.1 "Via:" headers.

    # Set to one of: Off | On | Full | Block

    ProxyVia On

    RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^($|/.*) \

http://127.0.0.1:8080/VirtualHostBase/\

http/%{SERVER_NAME}:80/site2/VirtualHostRoot$1 [L,P]

</VirtualHost>