How to Create a new Theme

Step by Step of Making a Theme

Creating a theme is easy by forking an existing "base" theme:

• Pick a base theme to start with, say, agedashi-1.2
• Pick a codename for the new theme, let's say morning-sunshine-1.0
• Copy the theme directory (if you have an HDA - if not, get the source from git):

      cd /var/hda/platform/html/public/themes
      cp -a agedashi-1.2 morning-sunshine-1.0

• To change the display name of your theme to match that of the directory, edit the settings in

      morning-sunshine-1.0/init.rb

• At this point the theme should be visible and selectable in http://hda/setup?tab=themes
• The most important file in the theme is the CSS file, which contains the styling for the theme. The file is located in

     style.css

• The rest of the theme look is determined by the images, which are referenced by the platform code
• The theme screenshot file should be 640x480 and is located in

     theme-sshot.png

• The theme thumbnail file should be 64x64 and is located in

     theme-thumb.png

• You can change the name of the theme and the color scheme of the piecharts in

     init.rb

Variables in the Init File

The init.rb file contains some variables that are expected by the Amahi platform. Only one is required:

• ret[:name] = "Morning Sunshine" — A string with the name of the theme (the user sees this)

Optional:

• ret[:headers] = ["foo.js", "bar.js"] — An array of strings,with names of javascript files to be included for this theme
• ret[:gruff_theme] = { ... } — Theme for the piecharts - see the examples in the other themes

Themes Sources in Git

The existing themes are available in the git tree at:

           amahi/themes

i.e

           git clone git://git.amahi.org/amahi.git
           cd amahi/themes

you can add yours there, then contribute it via a git patch. See Contribute for sending patches via git.

Testing a Theme

In your git tree,

           git clone git://git.amahi.org/amahi.git
           cd amahi/platform/platform/html
           ./script/server production

Then access your test environment as http://localhost:3000

Within the testing tree (in amahi/platform/platform/html), you can add new themes in

           public/themes/

each in a directory of it's own. Then you should see the new theme next time you run ./script/server (if you know how to duplicate a database, it may be bestter to run in development mode, no server restarts - see your changes live!) in this location:

           http://localhost:3000/setup?sub=themes&tab=setting

To run in development mode, you can duplicate hda_production db into hda_development and simply run:

          ./script/server

Theme "inheritance" from the Default

One interesting thing is that themes default to the "main" theme. If an image reference in the application does not exist in a theme, the image is served from the default theme.

This is to make it easier to make themes. One can start with a fairly "thin" theme and enhance it over time by adding new images and improvements.

Resources

• Customizable Amahi dashboard tab, in gimp xcf photoshop psd description
• Awesome GPL Icons
• Kuler, to select theme swatches

Making a Theme Faster

http://www.Userstyles.org/ is the home of the "Stylish" Firefox extension. It is similar to greasemonkey in that it can change the look of a page on the fly.

Although the advantage for theme coders is that it modifies CSS so you can write your theme in the browser and and then copy paste it to a .css file in your theme instead of writing it in a text editor and saving it then refreshing the page to see your changes. Making theme development UBER fast.

Tips

• Set the background-color of the application icons on the dashboard to white. This will make the icons better visable. Also, it won't matter what color the theme has.