Plone3 customizations

I'm currently still pretty happy with the new Plone3. Okay, I didn't like the nuPlone skin, but the default skin is still very complete, clean and userfriendly, though it does get a bit boring after 5 years :). Hoewever, I've already seen two articles recently about Plone3 customization behing hard:

• Some Plone 3 simple customizations are hard
• Plone 3 annoyances

In Plone3 it's easier to reconfigure the generic layout (or at least enable/disable parts of it) using the "@@manage-viewlets" hack (I call it a hack because you have to modify the url by hand - you can't find a link to this page anywhere as far as I know), but simple customizations by non-programmers are hard, it seems.

I don't have any real experience with this. I'm currently doing a rather large Plone 2.5.x project, where the customer's webmaster is doing some of the customization. Would this still work with Plone3? He knows CSS and HTML, which is sufficient (with my help) to do TTW/filesystem based skin development, but you can't expect your customers to learn ZCML, GenericSetup viewlets.xml and Zope3 component architecture basics.

But time will tell when I do a Plone3 project. Perhaps if I do the basic viewlet layout scaffolding and the webmaster can fill out/customize the templates. Less flexible for the customer but more maintainable for me, as Carlos and Andreas point out.

As for my own customization needs, what I want for my blog:

• A portlet that lists different categories (and perhaps date ranges)
• A better view template for the frontpage collection. It needs to display categories and perhaps a small piece of the body text.
• A custom design, but I'll have this developed by a 3rd party.
• OpenID / comment support
• Linkedin button / portlet
  

 UPDATE

Andreas has revistited his opinion, it seems viewlet TTW customization is still very well possible.

Another UPDATE

I'm going to do a real Plone 3 project the coming months - I'll document some of my experiences along the way (sorry, I'm not revealing anything about the project yet)