Spotlight on 2010: The New Theming Engine
By Randy Drisgill
December 16, 2009 —
(Page 1 of 2)
Love them or hate them, themes were a useful feature in SharePoint 2007, as they provided a nice medium-effort way of changing the look and feel of a SharePoint site without messing with custom master pages.
Having said that, one common complaint with SharePoint 2007 themes was that they weren't very approachable for beginners. You had to place files in the SharePoint root folder (12 folder), edit XML files, and even do an IISReset before you could see your changes. For the 2010 release of SharePoint, the product team was listening to our cries, and they have provided a new theming engine that is extremely easy to use.
Gone are the days of using the SharePoint root folder for themes. Now you can just use Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 to create a theme, save it as a .THMX file, and then upload it directly into SharePoint and apply to your site. In most cases now, site owners can create their own themes in less than an hour without the assistance of developers.
This feature allows you to assign 12 different colors, including background, text, accents and hyperlink colors, as well as two fonts for headings and body text. When this theme is applied to a SharePoint site, the CSS of the site (whether it’s the default CSS or your own) is parsed for special comment markup for coloring and font replacements, and new CSS and colored images are generated on the fly and applied.
One thing to note is that just like SharePoint 2007 themes, none of the underlying HTML can be changed with a SharePoint 2010 theme. Also, unlike SharePoint 2007 themes, you can only recolor existing images; no custom background images are created with a SharePoint 2010 theme (even if they are defined in the theme from PowerPoint backgrounds). Also, if you are using the full SharePoint Server 2010 (as opposed to SharePoint Foundation 2010), themes can actually be modified directly in the SharePoint 2010 Web user interface. This allows for even faster adjustments to themes by site owners, without even going through the steps of using Microsoft Office to save and upload a new theme.
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