Creating a Theme

The process for creating a new theme is nearly identical to the one for making a portlet. You will need both a project name (without spaces) and a display name (which can have spaces). For example, the project name could be "deep-blue", and the theme title "Deep Blue". In the terminal, navigate to the themes directory in the Plugins SDK and enter the following command (Linux and Mac OS X):

./create.sh deep-blue "Deep Blue"

On Windows enter the following instead:

create.bat deep-blue "Deep Blue"

This command will create a blank theme in your themes folder. Notice that the Plugins SDK automatically appends "-theme" to the project name when creating this folder.

Deploying the Theme

Open a terminal window in your themes/deep-blue-theme directory and enter this command:

ant deploy

You should get a BUILD SUCCESSFUL message, which means that your theme is now being deployed. If you switch to the terminal window running Liferay, and wait for a few seconds, you should see the message "1 theme for deep-blue-theme is available for use".

Go to your web browser and login to the portal as explained earlier. Then hover over Manage at the top of the page, and click on Page. Directly underneath the words Manage Pages select the Look and Feel tab. Simply click on your theme to activate it.