Using Themes?

Hi,

I’ve recently started using ASP.Net 2.0 for work. I’ve been looking into the themes feature and was wondering what people thought of it, particularly if they’ve used it on a production website. Has it made development faster or made the website more manageable?

Also, is there any place for me to download sample themes? I’ve seen the ones in the Starter Kits from Microsoft, but wondering there’s anything else out there to see how other people have used it.

Thanks

themes are a wonderful invention. Themes/Skins/CSS/Master Pages make a great combination. www.venturedeal.com is a site that i have worked on that uses them. they are useful. and say you want a site to load a random theme.. or a seasonal change.. just change it in the web.config for which theme it's going to use. and your done.. Developing a portal app to utilize this would be great as well.

Themes are an essential part of the web development in asp.net, it allows you to adjust the complete look and field on the fly. I tend to use a single skin file that uses some variables that I change and then it updates throughout the site. Basically your definding the appearance of tags similar to stylesheets but are so much more scaleable. - Hope that helps

This is an interesting topic. I also believe themes to be a wonderful new feature. However, I have found it difficult to sell to managers and corporations. I will explain.

The places where I have worked generally separate the roles of Web designer and web developer. Usually - as a web developer - I receive html from a web designer. I then take that html - which comes with a css file - and use it to build my code. It is not my place - within that dynamic - to change the stylesheets or anything about the design, only to write the code for those web pages. Of course, from time to time I may adjust the html so that my .NET controls work efficiently. However, I am not suppose to change the stylesheets without the designer beign involved.

With Themes, the roles of web designer and web developer become blurred a bit. The web designers I have worked with work strictly with Dreamweaver, and themes kind of make it so that they have to be aware of Visual Studio and .NET. Web designers don't usually like that, and it is difficult to sell themes to a company without the web designers on board.

Has anybody else dealt with this before?

John Ginzo
GinzoTech Solutions
http://www.ginzotechsolutions.com

One thing you have to remember as the developer is you will alway's be the one implementing the resources the designers give to you. For instance with the topic of themes. A designer is not going to be placing ASP.NET controls on a page (well not usually). When they design a form it will usually show standard html inputs just as place holders. And you the developer implement your .NET solution. Same thing with master pages and themes.. Let the designers use what they want, You get what they give you and fit it in to the master page. On average that will maybe take you 5 to 10 minutes to get a designers HTML doc transformed into an appropiate Masterpage file. From there you would add your content areas and so forth. You as a developer really should never have to concern yourself with what the designer is giving you as long as they are giving it to you in a compliant format that you can then take and implement your solutions as you are now.

dh:

Thanks for your input. What you describe about taking a designer's html and fitting it into .NET is of course what I do. I really wasn't talking about that, although I appreciate your response. Normally when a designer gives us html, it is not just html, it is also a separate style sheet file. This stylesheet file can be quite extensive, and in many cases drives the whole look and feel of the site.

Now, this is all well and fine using 1.1. Now with themes, you have the ability to create custom themes that define how your website looks.

So now, rather than just getting an updated style sheet from the designer and dropping it in, you are actually creating a .skin file and adding your styles there. So what do you do about the designer that has no idea about your new great new feature(and doesn't want to know) and a week from now sends you another css file. It used to be you could just drop the file in overwriting the old one. Now you have to know the specific changes and update your skin file, no?

Not a problem, but all I was pointing out is that with the introduction of themes, the jobs of developer vs designer are getting a little blurred. Either your designer needs to learn themes so that he/she can make your life a little easier, or every time they want to change a color or any other visual thing, you have to convert the stylesheet changes over to the theme file, and hope that their changes work ok. I was just wondering if anyone has delt with this factor with regard to themese and skin files specifically and how they handled it.

Thanks again,

John Ginzo
Ginzo Tech Solutions
http://www.ginzotech.com

For me, themes have certainly made development much faster and neater. For instance, check out callamfletcher.com - clicking "contact" on the first page, the popup makes use of the currently active theme - if you navigate to the portfolio page and then click "contact" again, a different theme is applied to the popup. In this way, using themes has helped render a stylish effect with very little extra work.

How flexible is this. Could I completely tailor this to suit my needs or would I be better off doing it all from scratch than modifying it?

Pete.

If you have the time/expertise, use masterpages with CSS and try and stay away from skins etc. This is simply because CSS maintains the cleanliness of the page whereas skins just insert lots of style tags in and amongst the controls. This can make the page quite bloated.

CSS will keep majority of your design code in one area AND keep the code clean.


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