Pingback from  Sharepoint link love 07-03-2007 at  Virtual Generations

Pingback from  Sharepoint link love 07-03-2007 at  Virtual Generations

Great lesson!  Thanks.  You can also just bounce the application pool in IIS Manager and the new theme will show up.

Now, how do you assign a theme to a site / site collection programmatically, using the SharePoint 2007 API?  :/

Thank you for this great post. It really helped my a lot. Please did you try to deploy it using some package or solution?

Thanks

gr8 idea!!!!!!!!!!

I tried your way to add a custom theme. but it dint work.

I m getting a Write Error on file _themes\<new theme>.

Please help.

Rashmi,

Make sure you have administrative access to "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\THEMES" folder. Why would you want to edit theme.css file in _themes\<new theme>? If you do that, it will only change the theme that has been already applied to your current web. This will not change the original version of your custom theme. In order to change your custom theme, you will have to go to this location ("C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\THEMES\<custom theme>") and make changes to theme.css file.

Thanks Tigirry for your quick response, i did change the theme.css same way as you told. The problem resolved as had to give the same security access settings to the new custom theme folder as its parent folder. It worked. Thank you.  

I also need to set this custom theme as default theme. so that entire site and sub sites will have the same theme. Do you have any idea how to go about it....?

Recently, I have observed that many MOSS 2007 and/or WSS 3.0 administrators want to apply their custom

Ce post s'intègre dans une série qui évoque la customisation de SharePoint, vous retrouverez le premier

When i switch to my custom theme, i get this error. Any idea?

Write error on file "_themes/MYTHEME1".   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequestInternalClass.ApplyTheme(String bstrUrl, String pVal)

  at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequest.ApplyTheme(String bstrUrl, String pVal)

If by any chance you have a french(other languages?) version, you have to change spthemes.xml under 1036 instead of 1033 on step 6.

Many thanks for this walkthrough!

How do you get it to be the "default theme" when a new site is created?.  I am having to manually change the Master Page on the site to inherit.

thanks

Hi Tigirry,

Excellent article. I've made some drastic changes to the theme.css file and uploaded some custom images and used this theme as the theme for the top level site. Unfortunately, when I try to apply my theme to another site within sharepoint I get the error mentioned above:

Write error on file "_themes/my_theme_name".

I've checked the permissions and security settings in windows explorer and they appear to be identical to those of the other themes. Any ideas on how to fix this?

Just for reference, I solved the problem I was having. Turns out that there were some hidden files in the theme folder due to editing the images on a Mac (resource fork files, .DS_Store files). Deleting these fixed the problem.

Hi, I've got the portal looking great thanks you your tips. On the team sites though, I want to copy the default style and make modifications, but that one seems to "live" elsewhere. Any idea?

Thanks for the help!

it is one of the good process thank you very much for ur theam idea

Thanks for the good article. I created a custom theam and it is working fine. But the error pages still show in the default theam. How to change the style of the error pages?

Hi there. I created a copy of a built-in theme (from Granite to Ghost, as you specified) and applied it  - all works fine.

However, if I try to customise the images (i.e. renaming settingsgraphic_granite.jpg to settingsgraphic_ghost.jpg and restarting iis, I run into trouble - the images don't seem to pick up. I have also renamed the various links to them in themes.css.

Is there some other area that I'm missing?

thanks for the .DS_Store hint Chris.

I might have gone insane trying to solve that one, but instead it just took 2 minutes to find this post.

"Hi there. I created a copy of a built-in theme (from Granite to Ghost, as you specified) and applied it  - all works fine.

However, if I try to customise the images (i.e. renaming settingsgraphic_granite.jpg to settingsgraphic_ghost.jpg and restarting iis, I run into trouble - the images don't seem to pick up. I have also renamed the various links to them in themes.css.

Is there some other area that I'm missing?

"

Ive got the same problem as rebbeca! Anyone that can help?

Hi,

 I tried creating the new theme as you have mentioned, I created using theme Jet, and my new theme name is displaying in the themes list and working, but if I change anything is theme.css file, it will not update the changes in the site.

Any idea why its not updating the changes?? I am using MOSS 2007

Thanks

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Hi, I am a newbie to Sharepoint, created the test theme with your tips but getting the following error message when applying the theme to my site

Cannot open "Ghost": no such file or folder.

I did all the files and changes as stated in your instructions.  Can you help?

Thanks,

Tony.

"

THis worked great, but I encountered an issue with Theme names. I copied a new theme called NEW01 and it worked fine. I then created a new theme called NEW02 (based on a different theme) and it wouldn't work - gave me an error that NEW02 already existed. Turns out that SP read NEWS01 the same as NEWS02. I changed the second theme to NEWSII and it worked fine.

Bottom line - do not use numbers in theme names

This worked great.

One issue -- do NOT use an underscore in the theme name.  I originally tried NEW_THEME and had problems applying the theme.  Once I renamed everything to reference NEWTHEME all was well.

Bottom line - do not use underscores in theme names

I look at (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\THEMES) and see there are far more themes there than actually show up in the portal when looking at the themes.  Is there somthing to modify that'll show these others (CENTRLAD, CLUB, FRESH, etc....)

How I can set "Cardinal" theme by default for sites that will be created?

I had to restart the application pool to get my changes to theme.css show up.  even iisreset didn't do it.  After that, I needed to select another theme and then go back to my custom one.  it sucks doing that EVERY time i need to make a change

If you are editing your theme on a regular basis, I´d recommend checking out a method I saw at heathersolomon.com, surprisingly easy.

basically you just use @import xxx.css in the theme.css file.

url:

www.heathersolomon.com/.../SharePoint-2007-Design-Tip-Import-your-CSS-for-SharePoint-Themes.aspx

yes this is a fine and rapid steps to create SharePoint Theme from existing themes, after that you can easily change colors as per your site theme from CSS

How I can set "Cardinal" theme by default for sites that will be created?

This works great on the parent site. However, I'm trying to use the same method on a subsite so the subsite can have a different theme than the parent. It's having no effect, the subsite keeps the same theme as the parent. What's up with that?

"Hi there. I created a copy of a built-in theme (from Granite to Ghost, as you specified) and applied it  - all works fine.

However, if I try to customise the images (i.e. renaming settingsgraphic_granite.jpg to settingsgraphic_ghost.jpg and restarting iis, I run into trouble - the images don't seem to pick up. I have also renamed the various links to them in themes.css.

Is there some other area that I'm missing?"

I ran into this issue and it seems that the sites cache the theme in their local director structure in the _themes directory. If you connect to your site using SharePoint designer, you will see the directory. Once you customize the css (ThemeName-65001.css) you can export the css, rename it to theme.css and copy it to your /TEMPLATES/THEMES/ThemName. after doing this, you need to go into the site settings on your site and reselect the theme so that it refreshes its local site theme.css to your newly created one.

How can I make my theme the default theme?