How to get rid of icons in Plone

Plone’s default style calls for an assortment of eye candy to decorate links, list items, and various other elements. Sometimes users don’t want to see these icons. Plone makes it easy to disable any of these individual elements, but sometimes tracking down all the icons can be difficult.

There are three places icons may appear in your site:

  • Site actions (top right of the content pane, items such as print)
  • Link decorations (for example, the globe next to external links)
  • Portlet item decorations (such as events and news)

Disabling any type of icon must be done in the ZMI.

Disabling site action icons

In the ZMI, go to /portal_actions. You’ll see a list of all actions. Simply uncheck the “Visible?” checkbox for each icon you want to get rid of.

Slightly more complex than site actions. In your ploneCustom.css, add a CSS rule for any link type you want to disable: set the background to “none” and the padding to zero. Here is an example:
.link-parent {
@ background: none;@
@ padding: 0;@
}

Here is a comprehensive list of all special link styles: “.link-parent, .link-user, .link-external, .link-https, .link-mailto, .link-news,
.link-ftp, .link-irc, .link-callto, .link-webcal, .link-feed, .link-comment”

You can simply turn this list into a CSS rule like so:
.link-parent, .link-user, .link-external, .link-https, .link-mailto, .link-news,
.link-ftp, .link-irc, .link-callto, .link-webcal, .link-feed, .link-comment {
@ background: none;@
@ padding: 0;@
}

All your link icons should now vanish.

Disabling portlet icons

This is much trickier than disabling other icons. What you must do is customize whatever portlet whose icons you want to remove. Manually edit that portlet code to remove icon images. All portlets can be found in /portal_skins/plone_portlets. For example, to remove the icons from portlet_events, find this line: <img src="#" alt="" tal:replace="structure here/event_icon.gif" /> and remove it. Other portlets should have similarly-defined icons.

As you can see, there is no easy way to disable all icons at once in a Plone site, but hopefully this article will provide a good checklist for places to check.

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