Going into the ZMI to edit templates and stylesheets and replace images sucks. Especially once we made it so there are two places you might need to go in Plone 3 (portal_skins and portal_view_customizations).  I've been working on a better way, the (drumroll please) Plone resource customizer*.

Thanks to the great work of my fellow sprinters at Plone Symposium East, I'm now ready to give a preview of the tool, which hopefully will see a first beta release real soon now™. Here's the screencast...

I forgot to mention in the screencast that Eric Steele has also started work on integrating this tool with Gloworm, so that it will be possible to find a resource to customize just by pointing and clicking (a la Firebug).

Currently the customizer displays items from CMF skin layers, browser view templates, viewlets, and portlets. Support for other things like browser resources or ZMI pages could probably be added, at least in a read-only fashion. The infrastructure is flexible enough to support new ways of registering resources that haven't been invented yet.

For now, if you're adventurous and want to try out the customizer, get a copy of the Plone 4 coredev buildout, and run it using -c experimental/skineditor.cfg

We are tracking bugs and ideas for improvement in the Plone bug tracker, with the component set to "Skin Editor."

This is only the beginning...David Bain is working on the customizer as part of the Google Summer of Code, and we've got lots of ideas about how to make it even more useful.

*better names hereby solicited :)