Customize a themes in Sharepoint 2010

Themes have been drastically changed in 2010. The new 2010 themes use an entirely different design. SharePoint 2007 themes used CSS and images while the new 2010 themes use the .thmx format. This means themes can be easily created using PowerPoint or any other tools which will be discussed later in this article. You will notice that the old SharePoint 2007 themes are no longer available in SharePoint 2010. There is now an easy way in SharePoint 2010 to change some colors and default fonts without having to change a bunch of CSS styles.

Creating SharePoint themes used to require editing CSS style sheets manually or using a tool like SharePoint Designer. Furthermore, packaging and deploying the themes required administrative access to the server. This is no longer the case! Now you can create a SharePoint theme without ever having to see a single CSS style and you can easily deploy it to your server and apply it all within your web browser! Here's how it's done with Microsoft PowerPoint 2010.

There are set of predefined themes available, which you can view from Site Settings->Look and Feel->Site Theme. Note that in SharePoint Server, you can customize the theme in the browser. In SharePoint Foundation, this functionality is not available. Here is a glimpse of the Site Theme in SharePoint Server (again, click for a larger view):



Set Theme in Site Settings


Create the theme

First, open Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 and proceed to create an Office theme just like you would for a PowerPoint presentation. See this PowerPoint help documentation which describes how to do this. For this example I created a theme called Greens which uses a predominately green color scheme. The files which make up Office themes have a .THMX file extension.

Upload the theme
Themes may now be stored in the Themes Gallery on your SharePoint server, and you can also find them on the file system on your SharePoint server in the following directory.

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server
Extensions\14\Template\Global\Lists\Themes

After you have saved the <ThemeName>.thmx file, open your web browser and navigate to the Theme Gallery on your SharePoint server. To find the Theme Gallery and upload your custom theme, follow these steps.

1. Open your SharePoint site
2. Click Site Actions
3. Click Site Settings
4. In the Look and Feel section, click Site theme
5. At the top of the page click the Theme Gallery link
6. Click the Documents tab
7. Click Upload Document
8. Click Browse
9. Browse to the <ThemeName>.thmx file you created and select it
10. Click OK
11. Click Save

Apply the theme

1. Click Site Actions
2. Click Site Settings
3. In the Look and Feel section, click Site theme
4. In the Select a Theme section select the theme you uploaded
5. Selecting a Theme in the list

Selecting a theme in the list will show you the colors and fonts specific to the theme. Here you can see the colors which make up the Greens theme I created.

6. Click the Preview button to see what the theme will look like once it is applied 
7. To apply the theme to your SharePoint site, click the Apply button.

Here you can see the Greens theme applied to a SharePoint site

Yes! It works for administration pages too!

It also works for dialog popup windows

the Site Actions menu ..

and the Ribbon is...

Logic

What happens when you apply the theme to your SharePoint site?  First, SharePoint opens up the THMX file and creates several images and CSS style sheets based on the colors defined in your custom theme. Then, a new subdirectory is created in the Themes Gallery and the images and CSS style sheets are put inside it. The first time you apply a theme to a SharePoint site the newly created subdirectory is named 0.  The directory name is incremented by 1 each time you apply a new theme to the site. 

Here’s a screenshot from SharePoint Designer 2010 which shows the subdirectory that is created when you apply a theme to a SharePoint site.  In this case the subdirectory name is 3 because I applied 4 separate themes to the SharePoint site; the subdirectory name started as 0 and was incremented 4 times.

If you want to modify the theme further you can then edit the CSS style sheets and the images in the new subdirectory for your theme.

Creating Custom Themes

SharePoint 2007 involved some effort to create themes as we had to deal with CSS and images. But as the themes design is changed completely in 2010, it is rather easy. Following are set of tools available which will make life easier. Here are the different ways of creating Themes.

Customize Theme Feature

Set Theme in Site Settings under the Look and Feel section is a default feature available in SharePoint Server, which will help you to customize themes. In Top Figure , you can see the option Customize Theme, which will help you to customize the theme you selected. Whenever you select a predefined theme and customize it, it creates a new theme called Custom and all the changes get applied to this custom theme. So every time you modify a predefined theme, the Custom theme gets overwritten.

Now, if you want to preserve this theme and download it locally, here are the steps that will help you to download this customized theme:

1. View the HTML source of the page and search for /_catalogs/theme/Themed/uniqueHexId/corev4-uniqueNumber.css
2. From the browser, navigate to http://yourServer/_catalogs/theme/Themed/uniqueHexId/theme.thmx and download the file.
3. Rename the file MyCustomTheme.thmx

Theme Builder

You can also create themes using Theme Builder, which is available at http://connect.microsoft.com/themebuilder

You can select an existing theme or create a new theme using this tool. Here is the screenshot of Theme Builder:




Theme Builder UI



Object Model Deployment

You can deploy the theme programmatically using the ThmxTheme class in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities namespace. The ApplyTo method applies the theme to a site collection. Here is a code snippet:

C# Code

using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb())
{
    using (ThmxTheme theme = ThmxTheme.Open(web.Site, "./_catalogs/theme/MyCustomTheme.thmx”))
    {
       theme.ApplyTo(web, false);
    }
}

Feature Deployment

It's always a best practice to deploy any artifact as a Feature. This works well for multiple site collections. Here is an example of the Feature and Elements XML files.

Feature.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Feature  Id="28E39FC9-BFE9-4FAE-9E71-C5BFEB818D2E"
          Title="My Custom Theme"
          Description="My Custom Theme"
          Version="1.0.0.0"
          Scope="Site"
          Hidden="FALSE"
          DefaultResourceFile="core"
          xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
  <ElementManifests>
    <ElementManifest Location="Elements.xml"/>
  </ElementManifests>
</Feature>

Elements.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
  <Module Name="MyCustomTheme" Url="_catalogs/theme" Path="MyCustomTheme" RootWebOnly="true">
    <File Url="MyCustom.thmx" Type="GhostableInLibrary" Path="MyCustom.thmx">
    </File>
  </Module>
</Elements>

For more information about deploying and installing a Feature, see Installing or Uninstalling Features. Once the Feature has been installed and activated, it will show up in the Theme Gallery.