Creating Liferay Themes

Themes are hot deployable plugins which can completely transform the look and feel of the portal. Theme creators can make themes to provide an interface that is unique to the site that the portal will serve. Themes make it possible to change the user interface so completely that it would be difficult or impossible to tell that the site is running on Liferay. Liferay provides a well organized, modular structure to its themes. This allows the theme developer to be able to quickly modify everything from the border around a portlet window to every object on the page, because all of the objects are easy to find. Additionally, theme developers do not have to customize every aspect of their themes. A theme can inherit the styling, images, and templates from any of the built in themes, overriding them only where necessary. This allows themes to be smaller and less cluttered with extraneous data that already exists in the default theme (such as graphics for emoticons for the message boards portlet).