SPOTLIGHT ON 2010
The New Theming Engine
By Randy Drisgill
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.
To create a theme in Microsoft Word, simply click Page Layout in the Ribbon and select Colors › Create New Theme Colors… Select some new colors, give it a name, and click Save. Then, with Page Layout still selected from the Ribbon, click Fonts › Create New Theme Fonts…, select a Heading font and a Body font, give it a name, and click Save.
Now, to export the .THMX file, click Themes › Save Current Themes… and save the .THMX file to your desktop. Next, to upload the theme file to SharePoint, simply open your SharePoint 2010 site, log in, then click Site Actions › Site Settings, and under Galleries click Themes.
From there, in the SharePoint Ribbon, select Documents › Upload Document, find your new .THMX file, then click OK and then Save. This makes the theme available for selecting in SharePoint. To select it, simply click Site Actions › Site Settings, and under Look and Feel, click Site Theme. From there, you can select your new theme and apply it to the site.
If you have SharePoint Server 2010, you can change the colors and fonts on the fly, and also apply the theme to all the sub-sites under the current site as well. Armed with this knowledge, you should be well on your way to creating your own themes for use in SharePoint 2010 in minutes, not the hours it took with SharePoint 2007!
Randy Drisgill is a SharePoint MVP and is the branding and design lead for consultant firm SharePoint 911.
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