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Written by Alan Hogan on 2006-01-18; viewed 15796 times.

Last revised: 2007-07-16 by Alan Hogan.

Theme Creation

Tips, Instructions, and Requirements

This page was not completed due to a lack of interest.  This page remains in case the project ever resumes, and “for historical reasons”.

Themes and What They Change

A theme, as dealt with by this page, is a defined look, style, or colorscheme for use with the new, CSS-based skin (tentatively entitled Divvy).

Mostly, this is done with a stylesheet.  The skin and site-wide stylesheets stay the same; the theme stylesheet is what is changed.  That stylesheet is supposed to do some or all of the following:

  • Change the colors (including background) of any parts of the page
  • Add background images
  • Add, modify, color, or remove borders
  • Add or modify images for the site logo
  • Style or use images for left- and right-column headings

The theme stylesheet should not change the following, as they are within the control of the skin and of the site visitor, respectively:

  • Page layout
  • Whether the font is serif or sans-serif – but the font for either sans or serif may be specified

How to Develop A Theme

  • Come up with colorscheme
  • Play in Photoshop or The GIMP or other image editor
  • Use the playground.zip package to mess with CSS styles