Sharepoint Designer

Question

Right, I've created a custom theme (TESTTHEME) and have managed to change various css styles etc... to fit in with my design. Now I've come to personalise the navigation I need to drop some new images to be used in the theme.css file as background images and so on. However, I can't seem to add images into the directory. I've added them into:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\THEMES\TESTTHEME

and refreshed Sharepoint Designer yet my images do not show in the listing. Am I doing something wrong (i.e. dropping the images in the wrong location) or is this a limitation of the customisation process? It easy to modify the existing images but I would prefer to add my own.

Answer 1

Sharepoint stores the theme in the filesystem, but copies those files into the database when the theme is applied. If you are editing your theme on the filesystem, you will need to switch your site theme to some other theme, then switch it back to your custom theme so the updated files are loaded into Sharepoint. Designer is looking at the database, not the filesystem.

Be careful though, because if you are making changes in Designer, they are NOT saved out back to the filesystem. So if you change your theme, you lose your changes.

What I do is edit and load my images in Designer on a development box. When I'm done, I copy and paste all the code and images back out to the file system to be packaged up for deployment on the production system.