For tips and tricks on how to properly deploy themes to your SharePoint environment, take a look at my previous post here, and you may also be interested in the Vista theme I put together that I describe here.

Here are screenshots of the ten free themes:

Construction:

Contoso:

Corporate:

Events:

OARP:

Procurement:

Publishing: 

Sporting:

Startup:

Team:

SharePoint features and solutions are absolutely essential if you want to provide an easy and maintainable method of deploying custom artifacts to your SharePoint servers.  A theme is a perfect candidate for this, as everything is file-system based and located with the 12 directory.  The only odd thing that throws a monkey wrench in this seemingly simple process is the SPTHEMES.XML file, which must be updated to include an entry for your custom theme.  Here’s a portion of that file, with the custom theme I developed in my previous post highlighted:

Now, you could by all means include the SPTHEMES.XML file in your solution and have it overwrite the existing file, but what if you have other themes defined in your file?  That approach will overwrite it, and you’ll have to reenter everything.  The recommended approach to this is to create a feature receiver that fires when the feature is installed and modifies the SPTHEMES.XML.  When the feature is installed, a custom <Templates> section is added for the custom theme, and when it’s uninstalled it’s removed.

NOTE: A feature is “installed” when you run the STSADM –o installfeature command, or when a feature is contained in a solution package and that solution package is deployed.

One important thing to mention is that this feature is scoped for the farm, not an individual site-collection or site, as the files deployed to the file system are used by the entire farm.  Let’s first take a look at the feature.xml file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Feature xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/"
         Id="2D965A22-73A9-4e00-A530-06F2AF6EC89F"
         Title="DevExpertise Vista Theme"
         Description="Adds the DevExpertise Vista Theme"
         Scope="Farm"
         Version="1.0.0.0"
         ImageUrl="DevExpertise\devexpertiseLogo.png"
         ReceiverAssembly="DevExpertise.SharePoint.Themes, Version=1.0.0.0,
                           Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=d39eedb6cff9b1c8"
         ReceiverClass ="DevExpertise.SharePoint.Themes.FeatureReceiver">
</Feature>

As you can see, it is executing a custom FeatureReceiver class.  At a high-level, the receiver looks like this:

[UPDATED 5/27/2009]

I received a couple comments that let me know that if this feature is activated on a farm with multiple front-ends, then the FeatureActivated event only gets fired on a single web front-end.  This is absolutely TRUE, and an oversight on my part (thanks guys!).  The solution is extremely simple – put your code in the FeatureInstalled and FeatureUninstalling events instead, as these get fired on EVERY web front-end in your farm!!  I’ve modified the code to reflect this:

public class FeatureReceiver: SPFeatureReceiver {

    private enum ModificationType { Add, Remove }

    public override void FeatureInstalled(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) {
        ModifySPTheme(ModificationType.Add);

        // if necessary, loop through all sites and set theme
    }

    public override void FeatureUninstalling(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) {
        ModifySPTheme(ModificationType.Remove);

        // if necessary, loop through all sites and reset theme
    }

    public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) {
        // do nothing
    }

    public override void FeatureDeactivating(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) {
        // do nothing
    }
}

For the sake of simplicity, I’m not including code to set the theme on any sites.  Since this is a farm feature, it doesn’t make sense to set the theme for a particular site here, but by all means if you wanted to you could.  Basically this feature receiver is only for modifying the SPTHEMES.XML file.

Let’s take a look at the ModifySPTheme() method.  It uses LINQ to XML to open and parse the file, add the necessary elements when the feature is installed, and remove it when the feature is uninstalling:

private void ModifySPTheme(ModificationType type) {
    XDocument doc = null;
    XNamespace ns = "http://tempuri.org/SPThemes.xsd";

    // path to the SPTHEMES.XML file
    string spthemePath = Path.Combine(SPUtility.GetGenericSetupPath(@"TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033"), "SPTHEMES.XML");
    string contents = string.Empty;

    // read the contents of the SPTHEMES.XML file
    using (StreamReader streamReader = new StreamReader(spthemePath)) {
        contents = streamReader.ReadToEnd();
        streamReader.Close();
    }

    using (StringReader stringReader = new StringReader(contents.Trim())) {
        // create a new XDocument from the contents of the file
        doc = XDocument.Load(stringReader);

        // retrieve all elements with a TemplateID of 'VISTA'.  At most, there should only be one
        var element = from b in doc.Element(ns + "SPThemes").Elements(ns + "Templates")
                      where b.Element(ns + "TemplateID").Value == "VISTA"
                      select b;

        // determine if the VISTA theme element already exists
        bool exists = (element != null && element.Count() > 0);

        if (type == ModificationType.Add) {
            if (!exists) {
                // create an XElement that defines our custom VISTA theme
                XElement xml =
                    new XElement(ns + "Templates",
                        new XElement(ns + "TemplateID", "VISTA"),
                        new XElement(ns + "DisplayName", "DevExpertise Vista Theme"),
                        new XElement(ns + "Description", "A Vista-like Theme"),
                        new XElement(ns + "Thumbnail", "images/DevExpertise.SharePoint.Themes/VISTA/thVISTA.gif"),
                        new XElement(ns + "Preview", "images/DevExpertise.SharePoint.Themes/VISTA/thVISTA.gif"));

                // add the element to the file and save
                doc.Element(ns + "SPThemes").Add(xml);
                doc.Save(spthemePath);
            }
        }
        else {
            if (exists) {
                // if the element exists, remove it and save
                element.Remove();
                doc.Save(spthemePath);
            }
        }

        stringReader.Close();
    }
}

Pretty slick, huh? Now, keep in mind that this only modifies the SPTHEMES.XML file – it does NOT set the theme for any site.  It will still be up to the user or site admins to set the theme for a given site.  Also, if this theme is already applied to a site and the feature is deactivated, it won’t reset the theme – it will only remove the entry from the theme settings page in Site Settings.  Finally, if a site has this theme installed and the solution package is uninstalled and/or removed, your site’s theme will be messed up because the source files are gone.  It is probably beneficial to at least loop through all the sites and reset the theme to something else if and when the feature is deactivated, but I’ll leave that to you. Enjoy!

That said, let’s take a look at theme I put together for the purposes of this blog.  It is loosely based on Vista’s black and aqua stylings, and is aptly named “Vista Theme”.  Before I get into the details about how I approach theme development (since it’s probably not the way you’re used to), let’s take a look at some screenshots of what the finished theme looks like.  In addition, I’m feeling extra generous today and have provided my completed theme for your enjoyment

Home Page:

Calendar:

Reports Subsite:

Document Library:

Search Center:

Site Actions Menu:

Theme Development 
Ok…now that I’ve [hopefully] gotten your attention, let me discuss what it took to develop this theme.  As you probably know, themes are stored in the following SharePoint directory:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\THEMES\

In here you’ll find all of the themes that ship with SharePoint out of the box, including GRANITE, SIMPLE, JET, etc..  To create your own theme, the easiest way is to start with a theme you like, copy the folder, and rename it something unique.  In my case, I named it VISTA.  Once you have created your custom folder, it’s imperative you locate the .INF file inside your theme folder, and rename to the name of the folder.  Again, in my case, VISTA.INF.  Next, open it up and change every occurrence of the previous theme’s name, and update it with the name of yours:

The next part is a little unorthodox, and I originally saw this approach described by Heather Solomon, and it has proven extremely useful and efficient.  The idea is to separate the actual theme artifact files (CSS and images) from the theme definition.  The theme definition, which includes every file in the theme folder, is cached whenever the theme is applied to the site.  This means that the only way you can make changes and see them appear is by updating the files in the file system, setting the site’s theme to another theme other than your own, and finally applying your theme again.  Trust me, this is nowhere near ideal when it comes to CSS, as I guarantee you’ll have to try something, test, try something, test, and so on.  The other option is to use SharePoint Designer and modify the cached files, in which case you must remember to update the actual file system files before it gets cached again. The beauty of Heather’s approach is that a single CSS file is cached, and the only thing it contains is a link to a file and the images on the file system in another location which aren’t cached.  This will allow you to make changes directly to the files on the file system and immediately see your changes.

Here is the structure of my Visual Studio solution.  NOTE: The VISTA folder is collapsed due to space, but inside it are all of my images and style sheets:

The next steps are typical – create an entry in the SPTHEMES.XML file that identifies your theme, reset IIS or recycle the application pool, and apply your theme.  If all was successful, you should see the following in your site’s theme settings page:

One thing I would like to explicitly explain – how to create custom web part headers.  If you pay close attention to the above screenshots, you’ll notice all of my web parts look like this:

This is achieve relatively easily as long as you can create decent-looking header images with your editor of choice (mine is Photoshop).  Basically you need 3 images: a background, a left side, and a right side. Zoomed in, my custom images look like the following:

wp-header-bg.gif:

wp-header-right.gif

wp-header-left.gif

The CSS styles are fairly simple:

/* Web Part Header Styles */
h3.ms-WPTitle {
    background: url('wp-header-left.gif') top left no-repeat;
    font-size: 8pt;
    padding: 3px 0px 4px 6px; }    

h3.ms-WPTitle, h3.ms-WPTitle a, h3.ms-WPTitle a:link,
h3.ms-WPTitle a:hover, h3.ms-WPTitle a:visited{
    color:#181818;}    

.ms-WPHeader TD {
    border-bottom:1px #297c95 solid;
    background: url('wp-header-bg.gif') top left repeat-x;
    padding-right: 0 !important; }        

.ms-WPHeader .ms-HoverCellInActive, .ms-WPHeader .ms-HoverCellActiveDark {
    background: url('wp-header-right.gif')  no-repeat right 0px;
    margin-top:0px;
    margin-right:0px; }

H3.ms-standardheader SPAN {
    color: #181818;}

/* Web Part Header Hover Image Styles */
.ms-HoverCellInActive, .ms-SpLinkButtonInActive{
    padding-right:5px;
    padding-top:2px;
    margin-bottom:0px; }

.ms-HoverCellActiveDark{
    border:none;
    padding-right:4px;
    padding-top:2px; }

.ms-HoverCellActiveDark img{
    border:1px black solid;
    background: #5E5E5E;}     

The only drawback to including these styles in a theme is these are applied to each and every web part in your site. It may not be appropriate to style all of the web parts, but rather web parts on a single page.  If you only want web parts on a single page to be styled, then you could add the CSS classes to a Content Editor Web Part, or link to the style sheet on the page’s page layout.  The important thing to note is that all web parts on a single page will by styled the same.  There’s no easy way to apply a style to one web part and not the other.  For simplicity sake, I’ve just included these styles in my theme.

You can download this theme and install it via the following farm-scoped feature.  NOTE:  The feature receiver I’m using relies on classes from the .NET 3.5 Framework (you’ll see why in my next post), but this will fail if you try to install it on a farm that doesn’t have 3.5.  If you’re just interested in the source files and style sheets, change the .WSP extension to .CAB and extract the stuff you want.  As I mentioned, I will be explaining how to install a theme via a feature in my next post.  Stay tuned!