H4 Themes HowTo

Creating a new theme for Horde is as simple as creating a new directory under horde/themes/ and adding the files info.php and screen.css.

The info.php contains information regarding the stylesheet. For now this is limited to the name of the theme.

An example for info.php:

<?php
/**
 * This is my personal theme.
 * It is based on the colors of my bike when I was five.
 *
 * Copyright 2010 John Doe <john@example.com>
 */
$theme_name = _("My Theme Name");

This is the theme name as it will appear in the theme list in the users' display options. The internally used theme name that you can use to set a default theme in horde/config/prefs.php is determined from the directory name you use.

Let's take the example of your new theme is in horde/themes/mytheme/, then the internal name of this theme would be "mytheme" while the users will see it as "My Theme Name".

Application themes

Adding a theme to an application is identical to adding a theme to Horde, with the exception that no info.php file is needed in the application.

Loading of CSS files

The CSS files a theme is built on are loaded in a specific order. This is important to keep in mind if you want to override specific styles or make use of inheritance.
CSS files are loaded in the following order, if they exist, where application is the currently loaded application and theme is the name of the active theme:

1. horde/themes/screen.css
2. horde/themes/theme/screen.css
3. horde/application/themes/screen.css
4. horde/application/themes/theme/screen.css

Defining theme colors and styles

This alone doesn't make a theme, of course. Next you will want to create you own set of colors and styles for your theme.

You can use the screen.css file to override the default Horde styles. It is a regular static css file, so if you know how CSS works and look at some of the existing theme files you could easily find out how to change certain colors, fonts, lines etc. You should not start with a copy of the "master" theme file themes/horde/screen.css but you should instead only define those CSS rules that you want to overwrite. This way you make sure that your theme doesn't miss any important style if the master theme file gets extended at some point in the future.

Generally, themes should only define colors and sizes. Overriding positioning elements should generally not be done as this positioning may break things in the pages (especially with dynamic interfaces such as dimp).

Note that various CSS files can be used. screen.css will always be loaded. Other CSS files will only be loaded based on the browser. The following browser CSS files are available:

Filename	Browser
ie8.css	Internet Explorer 8
ie7.css	Internet Explorer 7
ie6_or_less.css	Internet Explorer <= 6
opera.css	Opera
mozilla.css	Mozilla-based browser (i.e. Firefox)
webkit.css	Webkit-based browser (i.e. Google Chrome, Safari)

Adding custom graphics

If you want to add custom graphics to your theme you first need to create a graphics/ folder in your theme's directory, in our example theme this would be horde/themes/mytheme/graphics/. Then you need to add any graphics you want to use that will override the default graphics.

Theme graphics displayed via HTML <img> tags will be displayed with the following priority (note that this is different than the CSS loading priority):

1. horde/application/themes/theme/graphics
2. horde/themes/theme/graphics
3. horde/application/themes/graphics
4. horde/themes/graphics

Adding custom sounds

Sounds are stored in the sounds/ folder in your theme's directory. Sounds must be in WAV format (with a .wav file prefix). The override priority of sounds is the same as the graphics/ folder described above.