I’ve been busy lately developing my first full codeplex project. I now feel good enough about that process to have released a version on CodePlex earlier today. So say hello to SharePoint 2010 Site Styles.

Now you may be asking yourself…

What is this and why did you build it?

So with the release of SharePoint 2010 Microsoft decided that the concept of themes should be reworked within SharePoint, and they definitely needed it. So now themes allow you to modify the color and font scheme of any SharePoint site either through the browser or even through Office applications such as PowerPoint and by doing so you can produce a theme file with a .thmx format. This has made sharing, deploying and creating themes extremely easy.

But… what if you wanted to deploy your own custom CSS or your own custom images? Well, you can do one of the following:

1. Create your own master page and add your CSS.
2. Modify the master page through SharePoint designer and add your CSS.
3. Add your CSS in through a web part or other element.
4. Turn on publishing and set the alternate CSS file.
5. Create a Control Template that’s feature activated to embed your custom CSS file into the page.

Ok, so now you read through that list and realize that only option 5 has any merit what-so-ever because the rest either require publishing or are not deployable/reusable. Continue reading →