Professional SharePoint® 2010 Branding and User Interface Design

Overview of New Features in SharePoint 2010

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options were either to create a custom theme, which required development and could be challenging

for those unfamiliar with the process, or to just live with the out-of-the-box options.

SharePoint 2010 introduces a new theming engine that makes it much easier for users to create a

custom branded UI. The theming engine uses the

.thmx Open XML fi le format, which is already

used by Offi ce programs like Word 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 to create themes. Users create a new

theme by selecting 12 colors and two fonts (see Figure 2-5). SharePoint 2010 generates new CSS,

which is applied to the site, replacing the existing colors and fonts with the ones selected in the new

theme. The themes are saved to the theme gallery so that other users can reuse the custom themes

that have been created. If you’ve already created a custom theme for PowerPoint presentations or

Word documents, those same themes can also be imported into SharePoint 2010!

FIGURE 25

Rather than adding another CSS fi le on top of all the existing SharePoint CSS, as was the case in

SharePoint 2007, the new themes replace CSS in the existing SharePoint CSS fi les on-the-fl y. They

are marked with variables and use a comment-based design that is more standards compliant and

provides more fl exibility. This is benefi cial because the browser doesn’t have to download the extra

CSS fi le ...