One of the most common and potentially one of most important tasks in a MOSS 2007 project is styling the site to match the clients branding. Our preferred method for doing this is to create a new theme and then to staple this to our custom site template. I will cover creating a custom site definition in a separate post, my main focus today is creating a new theme.

The first step in creating your new theme is to copy an existing theme folder, can be found at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\THEMES, and re-name it. For the purposes of this example i have named mine 'NEWTHEME'.

 
Next open the folder and re-name the .INF file to match the name of your folder. In this example i copied the Classic theme so changed CLASSIC.INF to NEWTHEME.INF. In addition in the NEWTHEME.INF file you have to change all references from Classic to NEWTHEME.



Once you have created the new folder for your theme and re-named all references the next step is to add your theme into the list of available themes. To do this we have to add in an entry into SPTHEMES.xml, can be found at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033. Again the best option is to copy one of the existing 'Templates' nodes and re-name it to match your theme name.



If you now try and change the theme of an existing site you will now see your option.



Following these easy steps will allow you to quickly set up a new theme and change the styling of your site. In my next post i will show you have to create a custom site definition that uses a feature to bind the theme created in this example to all sites created in based on our new custom site definition.