Essential SharePoint

Modifying Themes

Themes control the color scheme and backgrounds used by SharePoint sites. You can change a site's theme by selecting Site Settings → Apply theme to site. The themes that appear on the Apply Theme page come from the .\TEMPLATES\THEMES folder on the SharePoint server. Figure 3-15 illustrates the structure of the theme definitions.

To change a theme:

1. Edit the files in the theme's folder.

2. Restart SharePoint by running iisreset.exe.

Changes to a theme automatically appear in sites based on the theme after SharePoint restarts.

To create a new, custom theme based on an existing theme:

1. Copy and rename a theme's folder in .\TEMPLATES\THEMES.

2. Edit the files in the new theme folder.

3. Rename and edit the .inf file in the theme folder to match the theme's name.

4. Edit the file SPTHEMES.xml in the \TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033 folder. This file loads the theme definitions in SharePoint.

Figure 3-15. Viewing themes on the server

The theme's .inf file contains the theme's title and localized name displayed for different languages, as shown here:

    [info]
    title=NewTheme
    codepage=65001
    version=3.00
    format=2.00
    readonly=true
    refcount=0

    [titles]
    1031=Eis
    ...

The SPTHEMES.xml file tells SharePoint where to find the theme definitions. For example, the following snippet adds NewTheme (based on Ice) to the list of available themes:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <SPThemes xmlns="http://tempuri.org/SPThemes.xsd"> ...