jquery ui css newbie question

Question

I just for the first time downloaded jquery and jquery-ui to use/learn last night.

I figured out how to get it working, and now I am playing around with the downloadable/customizable themes on themeroller...(nice tool).

A question about best way of maximizing the use of these tools:

I am integrating query/jqueryUI into an existing asp.net that I have already "themed" with colors/fonts that I like using my own custom css, I used the "themeroller" app to get the jquery UI elements to more or less match with my existing css color/font schemes.

The real question is, am I doing it backwards? Would I be better of designing my themes in themeroller, and then using that generated CSS for the ALL of my app? as opposed to using themeroller to mimic the css I already have for the non-jquery UI elements?

I could see that it would be nice to be able to use themeroller, download the CSS, and then base the non-jqueryUI CSS around the generated CSS, but I don't want to try it if that is not a generally accepted approach that will end up causing me problems down the road.

Answer 1

What I typically do is generate a theme for jQuery using the ThemeRoller that uses the colours from my website's CSS. I don't use the ThemeRoller theme for my website though, I usually keep these 2 separate.

Answer 2

I personally use the full jquery theme for my whole site. The ui-widget, ui-widget-content, ui-widget-header, ui-state-default, and ui-state-active, among others. I create my menus with these tags. I think its good to fit into that model, because if I want to swap themes on the fly or change a theme later on I won't have much resistence.

Of course theirs always exceptions. So, I always put my global.css file after my ui.all.css file in my header.