Micro Themes User Guide
This document provides information regarding the installation and use of themes from Micro Themes. All themes supplied by Micro Themes are designed to be used with the standard web project model implemented by Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. Their use in any other model has not been tested and is not supported by Micro Themes.
Downloading A Package
After each purchase of Micro Themes package/s you should receive an email containing links to each package purchased. Themes are packaged in Zip archives based on the styling, at time of publication there are two packages available Pastel and Strong, which are packaged in the files Pastel.zip and Strong.zip. Click on the link/s to download each package purchased. When prompted save the packages to a convenient location on your hard drive, for example C:\MicroThemes. Once downloaded we recommend you extract the contents of each package to the folder where the package was saved. If you are running Windows XP or have a program like Winzip installed you can usually right click on the package and choose an extract command to achieve this. For example with Winzip installed you can right click on a zip file, select Winzip>Extract to Here… and the contents will be extracted to the same location as the package.
Getting The Latest Version
From time to time, based on customer feedback we will update our themes packages. You purchase includes free upgrades to the latest version of the package. To download the latest version of a package you have purchased go to http://www.microthemes.net/Support.aspx and login with the Username and Password you setup during registration and purchase. Once logged in you will be presented with links to the current version of each package purchased. Use the links to download the package/s and extract the contents as described in the previous section.
Using A Theme
This section describes the installation of a Micro Themes theme for a project created with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 from the standard templates. However if you do not use VS 2005 then you can still use a Micro Themes theme in your project as long as it is located correctly within your web site. To install a Micro Themes theme follow these steps Launch Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
Select File > New > Web Site from the menubar
Enter a location and/or name for your web site and click on OK
Click on the root of the web site and select Website > Add ASP.NET Folder > Theme, this will add the root folder App_Themes and a subfolder Theme1. Each subfolder below App_Themes represents a new theme, any .skin or .css files added to these folders is loaded automatically when a page references the theme by the folder name. You can delete the Theme1 subfolder if you do not intend to use.
The next step is to copy one or more Micro Themes into the App_Themes folder Open windows explorer or an explorer window and locate the folder where you saved the Micro Themes packages. This can be done easily by selecting Start > Run, enter the
folder path e.g. C:\MicroThemes and press the Return or Enter key
Position the folder window so that you can see it’s contents and the Solution Explorer of Visual Studio 2005
Drag the theme you wish to install from the folder window and drop it on the App_Themes folder in the Solution Explorer of Visual Studio 2005. The theme folde
will be copied into the correct location within the web site
Now that the theme is in place, you set one or all pages of your web application to use this theme.
Setting The Site Theme In web.config
You can make sure all pages have a theme set using the configuration file for the web site web.config. Simply make sure a pages element exists in the system.web section and set it’s theme attribute to the appropriate theme name.
Setting The Page Theme In Source View
You can set the theme for a specific page in Source View by setting the Theme attribute of the @Page declaration to the appropriate theme name. This will override any global setting in web.config.
<%@ Page Language="C#" Theme="NavyStrong" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>
Setting The Page Theme In Design View
You can set the theme for a specific page in Design View by setting the Theme property of the Document element via the Properties Window in Visual Studio 2005
Getting Help And Support
If you need further help using a Micro Theme please email your question or issue to support@microthemes.net