How to Create a WSS Theme
Via
Brad Covell
This is actually more complicated than I had originally thought, so I spent some time doing it myself and verifying the steps below. These are the exact steps I went through and was successful in creating a theme for my WSS site.
- Open FrontPage 2003, Click on Format -> Theme -> then on the task pane that opens you can either modify an existing theme and save it, save it with a different name, or click “Create a new theme…” at the bottom of the task pane.
- Then on the screen that opens you can modify the colors, text, fonts… and then click “Save As” and just save it in the default location and give it a one word name.
- The theme will be saved in C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Themes\<theme name>
- Then go to http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;295409&Product=fp2000 create the Unpack_elm.vbs script, place it in the folder from #3 and run it. Then delete the vbs file out of that folder once the files have been unpacked.
- Copy the entire folder to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\template\themes
- Open C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\template\layouts\1033\spthemes.xml with NotePad.
- Add a template by adding the lines below:
<Templates>
<TemplateID>halloween</TemplateID> (this value should match the name of the folder you copied)
<DisplayName>Halloween</DisplayName> (this value can be anything, it will be displayed to the user)
<Description>Description</Description> (again any value is fine, this value is unused by SharePoint)
<Thumbnail>../images/thice.png</Thumbnail> (this image won’t be used and so you can use this value or leave it blank)
<Preview>../images/thice.gif</Preview> (This value is a .gif file of a screen shot of your theme applied to a site, it should be 300 x 179 and located here: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\IMAGES)
</Templates>
8. Perform an iisreset on the SharePoint server and now when you choose to Apply a Theme to a site your custom theme will be listed and you can apply it.
