10 Free SharePoint Themes full configuration for Dummies

As we know that share point does provide you some set of themes to work with you can locate them in at your site, go to site actions > site settings > under the look and feel category hit the site themes to go there, if you are working with MOSS you have an option to apply the master pages to your site as well, master pages are predefined pages which gives your site a uniform look and feel,

The difference between Themes and master pages is that themes needs to be applied on a site level and in master page you can set up an option to inherit to the sub sites, but if you use the sushi 3.4 you can set themes on all you sub sites in one go.

Incase you are still wondering how do we go about these you can refer a superb article by Heather Solomon difference between master pages and Themes difference between master pages and Themes, and you will know which one to implement,

As mentioned in my earlier posts I did discover some hidden themes in SharePoint packed with the product but they were not released because of there non uniform CSS, now Microsoft has released free themes which will work with you MOSS site these are available as free download here, you can checkout the preview this looks super cool on site but the implementation is not that simple

Pre requisites:

You need Visual Studio 2008 installed on your machine

You need Visual Studio 2008 extensions for SharePoint – available here:

o V1.2 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=7BF65B28-06E2-4E87-9BAD-086E32185E68&displaylang=en

· V1.3 CTP http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=fb9d4b85-da2a-432e-91fb-d505199c49f6

Now after you are done with the pre-requisite you can install the new cool themes for SharePoint from here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=0a87658f-20b8-4dcc-ad7a-09ad22641f3a

and enjoy a new look to your portal site, I am in a process of implementing these but will surely comment about the look and feel as soon as I am done :)

Alright addition to my earlier post today on 5/5/2009 why? not because the SharePoint themes were tough but because I had jus too much work

Okies now everywhere we see that the ten themes are just given with the links to understand the complete configuration you must refer to my older post at SharePoint Hidden themes; here I talk about Editing the SPthemes.xml file

so if you go step by step

1. Download and install the ten themes for SharePoint

2. Install Visual studio 2008 on the server

3. Download visual studio extensions for SharePoint

4. Then locate the Ten themes folder

5. Select any theme folder eg SportingsiteTheme folder

6. double click on the folder go to > Sporting site theme > Template > themes > SPORTING

7. copy this folder and paste it into c:\program files\common files\Microsoft shared\web server extensions'\12\template\themes

8. Also copy sporting_preview.jpg to the c:\program files\common files\Microsoft shared\web server extensions'\12\template\images folder

9. Now Modify the SPthemes.xml (Take tips from SharePoint Hidden themes;) located at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033

just add a chunk of code in between as:

“<Templates>
<TemplateID>sporting</TemplateID>
<DisplayName>sporting</DisplayName>
<Description>sporting</Description>
<Thumbnail>images/sporting_Preview.jpg</Thumbnail>
<Preview>images/sporting_Preview.jpg</Preview>
</Templates>”

this makes the theme available on site actions> site settings > site themes. so its easy to apply, save the file and close it.

10. now if you try applying this theme it will be applied to your site but will show something as this

11. Now comes the visual studio part, you have to go back to the place where you original Ten Themes for SharePoint are located and sportingsitetheme > double click and run the file SportingSiteTheme.sln, it will load and run the project in Visual studio 2008

12. Once that is done click on Debug button (green start button) the project will take its own sweet time to compile

then it gives you message as Activating feature sporting site template, and succeeded

13. you can check the featured being deployed at the Central admin > Operations tab > Solution Management > sportingtheme.wsp incase this is not deployed you can use the command prompt to do that, catch the links here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263231.aspx

14. now try to refresh the site or apply the same thing… it works !!!!

Here’s the new look

My recommendation try the Construction site theme its awesome

WSS search does not work after service account password changes

If you have a SharePoint 2003 version referred to as WSS, and you run into an scenario that search does not work reason being that the service account password expired on Active Directory.

First things first always remember to set the service account a condition to be on password never expires, Incase you miss it by mistake

Now as this happen you should

• shoot for KB http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934838 which works most of the time



• stop the Windows SharePoint search service from Central admin page > Operations tab > services on server and start it again proving the new username and password



• you can try the same from command line, follow article on http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287997.aspx



• The last step to try is rebuilding your configuration data base and providing the same service account



• because earlier when password was changed WSS config database was not updated of the change and it did not recognize the account so no search results appeared



• After you do the new config database you should run the stsadm –o spsearch –action fullcrawlstart



• And this will not start immediately you need to give it maximum and hour and then check the performance



• I am 100% sure this will work !!!!

Working with Sushi 3.4

Sushi is good to eat and great to work with !!! yes that's true I am talking about the sushi tool available from Codeplex, just to be on record I love Codeplex!! and the tools they are neat and work absolutely gorgeous. ...

Alrighty back to sushi, you can have a look at this little piece at the link http://www.codeplex.com/sushi pretty much info there, but just to list

sushi gives you and option to

Get reports from the site
save your profile images
Perform an stsadm backup with a GUI option to provide the location
Perform an stsadm restore
Send a test email

It also lets you work with lists, like copying view, metadata, bulk list creation, bulk site and column creation

It also lets you apply themes to the site as well as sub sites in one go, now isn't that just awesome...

Sushi is a good took when working with a large creation and deployment on Sharepoint sites and servers good for the view feature.

STSADM by default in My Command prompt

SharePoint has a lot of programs to be performed on the command prompt as in the GUI in fact after so much interaction with SharePoint product I believe that stsadm is more reliable and faster then the UI, so when ever you have to perform an action on the SharePoint site you open the command prompt and type the command that world knows about

c:\Program Files\common files\Microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin

and then you proceed with you list of stsadm commands, but is there an easier way to do it ????.

well of course there is we can add the stsadm path to the hive for command prompt so you can just hit command prompt and run the stsadm commands

>> Copy the path for 12\bin

>> On the SharePoint server(s), go to my computer > Properties and the Advanced Tab

>> Here hit on the button Environment Variables > here you see two frames user variables and system variables, go to system variables

>> Here go to the “PATH” variables and say Edit

>> Here paste the copied url which is c:\Program Files\common files\Microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin

>> Say OK and Apply and close

>> Now open command prompt and run stsadm –o help

>> you should be able to see a list of stsadm commands

>> Congrats you just made your life a little easier with SharePoint which is as unusual as pigs got wings ….

Traces of portal 2003 on my MOSS site

I just ran into an issue yesterday where,

we have upgraded the environment from Portal 2003 to MOSS 2007 with Gradual upgrade everything is running just fine, but when we try to go into a sub site which has some lists inside it I try to browse through the lists and i find that the lists contain and interface of portal 2003

Just a little background here, the portal 2003 SharePoint site was heavily customized with banner and bread crumbs and quick launch bar, we took out all the customizations before we run the prescan which was successful. then we run the gradual upgrade and this bought the default pages of the site

The issue is I am running into is that the some document libraries still show the SPS2003 Interface. Initially you might think that this is a result of incorrect upgrade, you can try running the command

stsadm –o –upgrade –inplace –url <url of the site> –forceupgrade

If this does not help try resetting site to site definition from the top level site this works in 90% scenarios

I was able to get over the issue with creating a new view on my document libraries and which helped me get rid of the portal 2003 interface

That means when the upgrade was performed the Views did not get updated and sustained the old SPS 2003 look and feel so in short the default views got corrupt and so we have to work around it by creating a new view and replacing the default view.