HOW TO: Create a custom theme for SharePoint 2010

Creating SharePoint themes used to require editing CSS style sheets manually or using a tool like SharePoint Designer.  Furthermore, packaging and deploying the themes required administrative access to the server.  This is no longer the case!  Now you can create a SharePoint theme without ever having to see a single CSS style and you can easily deploy it to your server and apply it all within your web browser!  Here’s how it’s done with Microsoft PowerPoint 2010.

Create the theme

First, open Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 and proceed to create an Office theme just like you would for a PowerPoint presentation.  See this PowerPoint help documentation which describes how to do this.  For this example I created a theme called Greens which uses a predominately green color scheme.  The files which make up Office themes have a .THMX file extension.

Upload the theme

Themes may now be stored in the Themes Gallery on your SharePoint server, and you can also find them on the file system on your SharePoint server in the following directory.

C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft SharedWeb Server Extensions14TemplateGlobalListsThemes

1. Open your SharePoint site
2. Click Site Actions
3. Click Site Settings
4. In the Look and Feel section, click Site theme
5. At the top of the page click the Theme Gallery link
6. Click the Documents tab
7. Click Upload Document
8. Click Browse
9. Browse to the <ThemeName>.thmx file you created and select it
10. Click OK
11. Click Save

Apply the theme

1. Click Site Actions
2. Click Site Settings
3. In the Look and Feel section, click Site theme
4. In the Select a Theme section select the theme you uploaded. 

      Selecting a theme in the list will show you the colors and fonts specific to the theme.  Here you can see the colors which make up the Greens theme I created.

      6. Click the Preview button to see what the theme will look like once it is applied
      7. To apply the theme to your SharePoint site, click the Apply button

      Here you can see the Greens theme applied to a SharePoint site.

      Yes!  It works for administration pages too!

      It also works for dialog popup windows …

      … the Site Actions menu …

       and the Ribbon too!

Under the hood

What happens when you apply the theme to your SharePoint site?  First, SharePoint opens up the THMX file and creates several images and CSS style sheets based on the colors defined in your custom theme. Then, a new subdirectory is created in the Themes Gallery and the images and CSS style sheets are put inside it. The first time you apply a theme to a SharePoint site the newly created subdirectory is named 0.  The directory name is incremented by 1 each time you apply a new theme to the site. 

Here’s a screenshot from SharePoint Designer 2010 which shows the subdirectory that is created when you apply a theme to a SharePoint site.  In this case the subdirectory name is 3 because I applied 4 separate themes to the SharePoint site; the subdirectory name started as 0 and was incremented 4 times.

If you want to modify the theme further you can then edit the CSS style sheets and the images in the new subdirectory for your theme.

One size does not fit all

The approach outlined in this blog post will not change the layout of your site, it will merely change the colors, heading font, and body font.  It’s a helpful approach to use when developing a prototype or a demo and you don’t have enough time to dig into the CSS to change the layout.  It’s also a helpful approach to use when your requirements do not call for major look and feel changes and color changes will suffice.  Other approaches also exist for changing the look and feel of your SharePoint sites, such as making custom Master Pages, Page Layouts, and CSS files.  This approach usually takes less time than the other approaches, however it is not as flexible.