Creating Themes in Sharepoint 2010

Question

As you might of guessed if you have read my other few posts, im a very new, accidental Sharepoint administrator (but really glad of it) just wanted to point that out if my questions do come across ultra newbie.

I have made an intranet site as my first experience with sharepoint, It'a just a few sites at the moment with in my web application. Over the last few nights I have customized the theme on the front page using the Sharepoint Designer and have made something I'm pretty happy with. Is there a way I can save this as a theme so I can easy apply it to the other sites in my collection?

Answer 1

Firstly not sure how you did this in SharePoint Designer, not being a SPD person myself, when I tried it just opened a link to the Themes editing page in the browser on the site.

But presuming there is a way, it most likely saved your theme into the Theme Gallery, this is in Site Settings under the Galleries Section.

Having checked that Gallery section and not having a specific name of a Theme selected and there is one Theme in their I do not recognise then it is likely that the Theme of "Themed" is the Custom Theme you have generated.

However Clicking on the "Themed" link does not provide you with a thmx file. All its components are folders and files subordinate to that theme.

This manner of creating themes is probably not the best way to approach Creating a new theme.

Instead if you Start with one of the Themes that are already defined (not default) and Save that thmx file by clicking on the link in the Themes Gallery then you can save that file.

That thmx file can be editing by PowerPoint and resaved, I find this extremly cumbersome tool to use for theme editing.

I edit my themes using the Theme builder from Microsoft instead. https://connect.microsoft.com/ThemeBuilder once resaved that thmx file can be loaded into the Themes Gallery and selected.

If you want this Theme on lots of sites, then it is more likely you will want to package it as a feature and have it copy and set the theme on feature activation, but thats another post.

Here is a blog post I just found about editing themes as well. http://toddbaginski.com/blog/how-to-create-a-custom-theme-for-sharepoint-2010-aspx/

Answer 2

Yes, you can save this as a .thmx file and upload it to the other sites for use.

Answer 3

I worked a little bit on sharepoint designer. In here what you can do is there is a concept of masterpages which is very similar to theme creation. What masterpage does is, it lets you create a customized look and feel and then let you save it so that you can use it for future. For this what you have to do is the page that you created is probable an aspx page save that page as an aspx page in your local system then the site to which you need this masterpage in the site settings there is an option called "Master pages and page layouts" under gallery. This lets you save masterpages. go to this option and upload your aspx page here. while uploading this will give you an option of saving this page either as a masterpage(or publishing masterpage in my case) or a page layout. select masterpage and then save it select it and publish and finally approve it. This now is added to your site as a masterpage. to apply this masterpage onto that site you have to go to another option called "Master page" under "Look and Feel". select your masterpage in dropdown and that masterpage will be applied to this site.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-designer-help/customize-a-master-page-to-brand-your-site-HA102449505.aspx

http://sharepointdotnetwiki.iblogger.org/2010/08/creating-sharepiont2010-masterpage/

Apply master page for all subsites in SharePoint 2010

these should give you some idea

Hope this helps.