SharePoint Happenings

Leveraging Themable CSS

Daniel A. Galant — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 01:51:27 +0000

There have been many changes and improvements with the release of SharePoint Server 2010 and how it implements a number of features and services. One of those features is the manner in which Themes are created, applied and customized in your SharePoint deployment. While playing with the new theming engine, I came across a number of articles and posts dealing with how to create themes using Office applications, such as PowerPoint and Word. However, there were not many that dealt with the customization of your CSS through the use of the new Theme Comments that SharePoint will leverage in order to apply your theme scheme to your customized Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

This article deals with that very topic as I’ll endeavor to guide you through how to create and apply theme comments to your custom CSS so you can indeed leverage Themes in SharePoint 2010. To start off, let’s simply take a look at attaching some custom CSS to a Master Page in order to apply our own styles to the SharePoint site.

While there are several methods for attaching a custom style sheet to your Master Page, best practice dictates using the link in the of your Master Page. With SharePoint 2010 now supporting the After property, you can ensure that your custom CSS is applied after SharePoint’s core styles.

Now we’ll also add a custom header image to the page so that we’ll be able to leverage the RecolorImage token as well later in the article.

Let’s take a look at the CSS itself.

Notice the body #s4-ribbonrow setting the background-color as well as the TopHeader class pointing to our custom image. There are no theme comments added to the CSS yet, so the ribbon row color won’t be affected when you apply a theme to this site and no changes will be made to the header. Setting the new master page as our default master for the site will now render the site as in the image below.

If you then apply a theme to the site what happens? Let’s use the Vantage theme and see what the effect is.

Notice the changes to the TopLink, QuickLaunch and settings page, but the ribbon row and custom header remained the same. In order for these elements to also be affected by applying a theme, you must add the appropriate theme comments to your custom CSS.

In order to leverage theme comments when they are added to your custom CSS, you must first be sure to place your CSS files into the proper location within your site so that SharePoint will actually read them and apply the settings to your pages. For theme comments to be read by SharePoint when you apply a theme, you need to place your custom CSS files in a folder called Themable that you create in the Style Library of your site. This folder does not exist out of the box, nor will it be created magically for you when using custom CSS and theming.

The Style Library before:

The Style Library after creating the Themable folder:

Once you have created the Themable folder, import your custom CSS files into this location and be sure that your registration links are pointing to these files and not somewhere else in your site. Now to make your styles leverage themes when applied, you need to add the theme comments to your CSS.

There are three different tokens that can be leveraged by your CSS, ReplaceFont, ReplaceColor and RecolorImage. I’m not going to go into depth on the effects or properties of these elements here but ReplaceFont will let you change certain font elements to use one of the two available theme fonts, ReplaceColor allows you to substitute any of the 12 theme colors into your styles and RecolorImage will allow you to use any of the 12 theme colors in your images. We’ll see more on this later.

Right now we are going to add a comment so that the ribbon row will be effected when you apply a theme to the site. Since we are trying to leverage the theme’s colors to apply to the ribbon row, we’ll use the ReplaceColor token. The syntax for the comment is as follows:

/* [ReplaceColor(themeColor:”color”, property:”value”)] */

In the above comment, color represents one of the 12 theme color choices that you want to use to replace the color property of your style such as Dark1 or Accent5. For property you can use either themeShade or themeTint to darken or lighten (respectively) your color choice with a value between 0.0 and 1.0. Be aware that if you are not going to use the property:”value” option, do not include the comma in your comment. Doing so will cause SharePoint to skip your comment and you’ll be trying to figure out why your choices are not being applied.

The image below shows the theme comment added to the custom CSS file.

This line simply tells SharePoint to replace the background-color #abc830 with the themes Dark2 color. You’ll now save your modified CSS and try applying a theme. Once again I used the Vantage theme. The image below shows you the 12 colors defined by this theme.

The result of applying this theme at this time is the following.

Alright. So what happened to the ribbon row and the custom header we applied? Here you see the first of several issues you can run into when trying to use theme comments with your custom CSS. The site that I am working with in this example happens to be a publishing site and so the Style Library is under content approval. This means that any changes made to its files need to be published as a major version and approved before they can be properly used. Now while SharePoint seems to read and apply changes made to the CSS styles without having to go through all this, it does not process your theme comments until you have an approved major version of the file. As a matter of fact, as can be seen here, it seems to completely disregard the style altogether.

After publishing the file as a major version and approving it let’s apply the theme again. Theme comments are only processed at the time the theme is actually applied to the site. Therefore, any time you make a change to your file you will need to re-apply your theme to see the effect.

Here you can see that the ribbon row has now picked up the Dark 2 color of your theme, but the header is still the original green color. To change this you need to use the RecolorImage token in the header’s style declaration. The syntax for the RecolorImage token is as follows:

/* [RecolorImage(themeColor:”color”, method:”value”)] */

Once again color is the theme color you want to use with your image. Value can have one of three values, Tinting, Blending, or Filing. Tinting uses your theme color for the image colors, Blending mixes your theme color with the original color of the image and Filing completely fills the image shape with your selected color. In the image below you’ll note that I am going to recolor the image using the Accent 2 color and tint the image.

Again you need to publish and approve the CSS file after making the change and then reapply the Vantage theme. The result is as follows:

If you choose to use the Blending option it would look like this:

One point I would like to make here, in my experience the value is case sensitive, Blending will work but blending will not.

So you can see that you have several options when it comes to themes and your custom CSS. Take some time and play around with the choices provided by using theme comments and see what effects you can come up with for your sites.

I hope this article helps you avoid some of the issues I ran into and gets you smoothly on the theme scheme highway. Till next time….

Its Alive

Daniel A. Galant — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 05:01:48 +0000

Yup, the SharePoint Happenings blog is live once more. I’ll continue to cross post with the Mindsharp blog site as well in an effort to reach more people, but I will indeed be posting material to this site once again.

SharePoint Architecture–A view from space

Daniel A. Galant — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 02:24:21 +0000

There is no denying that SharePoint is finding its way into more and more organizations and people from all aspects of a company find themselves interacting with, working on and designing for the corporate SharePoint deployment. Often they find themselves dealing with terms such as Farm, Web Application, Site Collection and other SharePoint terms that, for them, hold various other meanings and connotations. Today I thought I would share with you an analogy I’ve been using for sometime now whenever I need to describe the SharePoint architecture. Whether you’re a techie, the marketing guy or even a CEO, relax and come along for the ride.

Imagine, if you will, that you are a space explorer who has been tasked with finding and colonizing a new world to help support and bring new life to your dying home planet and its population. You have been traveling through the cosmos and have at last located a planet you feel will do very nicely for your purposes. You land your craft and establish your base of operations from where you will begin the task of colonizing this new world. As you are the first person to set foot on this new world you get to name it and call it SharePoint. You have now claimed your planet, your Farm, for your home world’s population to use and have your base of operations established, Central Administration, from where you can control the colonizing effort. Now the task of terra-forming must begin as you need to prepare the world to welcome it’s new inhabitants.

The first thing you need to do on this new world is create the continents upon which you can build the structure of this new world. How many continents you need is up to you and the requirements set forth by the home worlds governing rulers. Each continent will provide you with a land mass that you can then carve up into manageable units. These continents server as the web applications of your SharePoint farm and provide you with the address space, or URL, that your population will use to find their new homes.

Once you have the continents prepared you can now divide them up into individual countries that will actually govern and rule the people of your planet SharePoint. Each country is a sovereign state and will be responsible for the safety and security of its people. Countries do not share resources with other countries as resources are vital to the health and welfare of the people of that country. Furthermore, in its initial state, each country maintains a closed border policy. This means that citizens of one country cannot travel to or visit any other country. Now it is possible for one country to decide to open its borders and grant entry to the people of another country, but that is strictly up to each country on a case by case basis. These countries are the Site Collections in your SharePoint deployment

Countries can be large, small; they can be a single kingdom or they can be further divided into additional political entities such as states or provinces. Each state can have its own set of rules and security, but it still must conform to certain rules put forth by the countries governing rulers. Much like the United States is made up of 50 states, each state with its own rules and policies, each state must still abide by certain federal laws and regulations. Unlike countries, however, there is free trade between the states or provinces of a given country and the citizens of that country are free to travel from state to state. Now while it is possible for a state to enforce its own security and close its borders to some of the population, this can hinder the functioning of the country, as a whole, and interfere with the general feeling of co-operation that you are trying to foster on your new world. The states or provinces are the Sites in our SharePoint deployment.

Your states can be further divided into counties and cities as you see fit or the need drives your colonization effort. At any level though you will have offices and services that are used by your people to do their work or store their belongings. These are the lists and libraries that will populate your sites and subsites throughout your Site Collections within the Web Applications that are all part of your new SharePoint Farm.

So what have we got here? You find a planet, your farm. You establish a base of operations, Central Administration. You create continents, Web Applications. On the continents you establish countries, Site Collections. You can divide the countries into states or provinces, Sites or Subsites. These can be further sub-divided as needed. You create offices, schools, stores, etc., lists and libraries. Bingo, SharePoint.

If someone comes along who doesn’t like how you have setup your world or the rules you have established, well, they can go find another planet and start their own SharePoint farm. After all, it’s your world.

Blog Site Moving

Daniel A. Galant — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 04:05:44 +0000

My blog posts are moving to our new home located at Mindsharpblogs where you can find a number of prominent posters providing you with some great tips and tricks on all things SharePoint. If you happen to drop by here, please note the new address and add us to your list of favorites and feeds.

Back to Basics

Daniel A. Galant — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 05:05:13 +0000

As more and more folks start turning to SharePoint as their solution of choice for information distribution and collaboration, I have been noticing that many of these installations seem to have been quick, no research installations. A number of these installations suffer from common mistakes that are then made by well intentioned, but over-worked and under trained Administrators. In an effort to help stem the tide and perhaps save one or two of you the trouble of having to redeploy SharePoint in an effort to fix an unsuccessful roll-out I’d like to take a trip back to the basics.

First of all, if you are reading this then you are indeed a step ahead of those who did not take the time to do at least a little bit of research on how to properly deploy SharePoint before inserting the CD and hitting OK. With a little planning and forethought you can avoid many of the common mistakes that plague the first time install.

Step 1: Do not use your own personal account when installing SharePoint onto your servers. The account that is used to do the actual binary installation of the SharePoint files is going to own those files and have certain privileged access that, for tighter security, really shouldn’t be your user account. Furthermore, do not use a local user account, the local system account or a network system account for the installation of SharePoint binaries on your servers. SharePoint can scaled out into a distributed server deployment and local accounts simply will not provide you the access rights you’ll between servers. For this part you are going to want to create a basic user account in your Active Directory domain that you will use for the installation process. This account does not need to be a Domain Administrator, an Enterprise Administrator or even a Server Admin. It simply needs to be a member of the local Administrators group on your SharePoint Server systems. In addition to this you also need to grant the account DB Creator and Security Admin rights on the SQL server that will function as the back end database for your SharePoint deployment. That’s it.

Step 2: When performing the installation you will be presented with a couple of different options. the first of these choices will be to select between a Basic or an Advanced installation. This one is easy, always choose Advanced. Always. A Basic install will use SQL Express on the local system as your database and therefore limit the size of your SharePoint deployment. Also, you will not be able to expand your Basic install in the future by adding additional servers should you want to grow your SharePoint farm. The next option you will be presented with will the type of server installation to perform for your Advanced choice. These options include Complete, Web Front End and a Single Server install. Guess what, this really isn’t much of a choice either. Always perform a Complete installation. Always. The Single server option is the same as the Basic option from the previous screen and so has the same limitations. Choosing the Web Front End option will limit your flexibility in the future if you should want, or need, to move roles between servers, or worse, need to compensate for a failed system. Save yourself from future headaches and just perform an Advanced>Complete installation every time.

Step 3: Once you have installed SharePoint, making sure you used the account you created in step 1, you will then run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard. This is where you will actually create your Farm and establish your Central Administration Web Application. During this process the wizard will prompt you for the Database Server, Database Name and the credentials of an account that will be used for the Central Administration Application Pool. At this point you should once again supply the credentials of the account that you just used to actually perform the installation, the one you are currently logged onto the machine as running this very wizard. Yup, the installation account and the Central Administration service account really should be using the same account. This will help you down the road if these two accounts are indeed the same account. It has been my experience that when using different accounts for these two functions, odd behaviors can creep up in your SharePoint world.

Following these few simple steps can save you a number of headaches down the road while working with SharePoint and help get you off on the right foot. I realize that many over-stressed network folks simply don’t have the time to get any proper training before having to roll out a product such as SharePoint. Still, before you get to deep into such a project I highly recommend that you at least grab yourself a good book to keep by your side while deploying. One such tome I feel should be by the side of every SharePoint Administrator is the SharePoint Best Practices book by Ben Curry and Bill English.

Until next time…

Mindsharp offers first course in OCS 2007

Daniel A. Galant — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 21:43:53 +0000

That’s right, Mindsharp, for several years now known as the leader in SharePoint education has begun offering training in Microsoft’s Office Communications Server. Their first course in this new vertical for them is Core Technologies in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. This 5-day class focuses on the design, administration and troubleshooting of an OCS 2007 server deployment. Now let me be honest here, I am a bit biased when it comes to talking about this new course. After all, I had a part in putting it together. To find out more about just what is included in this class as well as where it is being offered, check out the earlier link. I hope to see some of you in class in the near future.

SharePoint Best Practices Conference

Daniel A. Galant — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 19:08:19 +0000

Following on the success of the first, and very popular, SharePoint Best Practices Conference, it has been announced that the second SharePoint Best Practices Conference will be held Feb 2-4, 2009. This time, however, the conference will be over on the West Coast, at the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines in beautiful San Diego, CA. At this time some of the speakers will include a keynote by Joel Oleson, sessions lead by such SharePoint notables as Bill English, Ben Curry, Mike Watson, Todd Bleeker and Todd Klindt. For a full and current listing be sure to check out Best Practices SharePoint Conference and while you’re there, be sure to register, as space is limited.

SharePoint Best Practices Conference

Daniel A. Galant — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:30:06 +0000

Sponsored by Microsoft Press and Mindsharp, the first SharePoint Best Practices conference will be held this September in Washington D.C. This is one event I would highly reccomend you look into if you are in any way involved with a SharePoint deployment in your environment. For more information on the conference check out their website at www.sharepointbestpractices.com.

SharePoint Virtual Conference

Daniel A. Galant — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:22:49 +0000

I’m not big on self-promotion but I just wanted to take a moment to let people know about the upcoming SharePoint Virtual conference that is being hosted by SSWUG.org in October. To find out more information about this, like who will speaking, what the sessions will be, and other events, check out www.vconferenceonline.com. BTW – I’ll be presenting a few sessions myself so drop by and give it a look.

Having Issues?

Daniel A. Galant — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 05:25:52 +0000

I’m glad that some of you have found the information here of use to you. If you should happen to drop by looking for answers for an issue you’re having with SharePoint, a problem you’re trying to solve or a task your stuck on that would make for a good post, let me know and I’ll see if I can help out. In the meantime, happy SharePointing.