Theme Not Defined

Brendon McCarthy asked on May 30, 2014 15:18

Following this guide (https://docs.kentico.com/display/K8/Creating+skins+using+ASP.NET+themes), I'm attempting to create a new theme in Kentico 8. However, I cannot get the theme to appear in the administration area.

"Themes must be defined in a folder located under the App_Themes directory."

https://db.tt/VnxSrVJm

"The name of this folder needs to be the same as the code name of the used CSS stylesheet."

https://db.tt/E4KlQaL1 and https://db.tt/in0PcrD9

"You can manage the content of a stylesheet's theme folder directly from the administration interface in the CSS stylesheets application. Edit () the given stylesheet and switch to the Theme tab."

https://db.tt/XYwB03ro or https://db.tt/tT0nx2Re

What am I missing? Am I looking in the wrong places?

This is a fresh installation of Kentico 8, no starter site, using the Site Wizard.

Recent Answers


Brenden Kehren answered on May 31, 2014 15:11

There is no need to create any files/folders within the file system manually. Start over and use these simple steps to accomplish what you're looking for:

  1. Create a new stylesheet. Give it whatever friendly name you'd like and ensure to give the code name the same as your site code name. For instance if your site code name is VictoriasSecret, use that same code name for the stylesheet.
  2. After the stylesheet is created, put some blank text in there like /* placeholder */ and save.
  3. Click on the Theme tab and add a new folder called "images"
  4. Check your file system, you should now have /App_Themes/VictoriasSecret/images in your file system. You won't see the .css file in there because its stored within the database.
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Brendon McCarthy answered on June 2, 2014 11:27

I swear this should be simple, but something isn't clicking. I've followed your instructions, with matching code names (I'd tried this before just guessing actually)...but I don't see the "Theme" tab anywhere except on Page Templates or Page Layouts.

Stylesheet - https://db.tt/dyZYosx5 Site - https://db.tt/Pso2rkjl

An additional note, there will be 3 sites on the platform, hopefully all sharing the same parent theme to some degree. The theme also needs to support more than a single stylesheet, currently using a collection of LESS files that rollup into a single reference, I'm not sure how that plays into this.

I'm using Visual Studio 2013 so the CSS stylesheets do not have to live 100% in the database and I would prefer to edit them in Visual Studio.

Appreciate the help for a Kentico newbie.

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Brenden Kehren answered on June 3, 2014 08:28

For the multiple themes check out the Personal site template. That has 3 different themes and you should be able to get an idea on how to set things up.

What type of website did you choose when installing? Portal or ASPX? I can't say I've ever seen that language option before?

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Brendon McCarthy answered on June 6, 2014 17:18

I contact supported and was told the "Theme" tab does not exist in Azure project types. I later found this buried in the documentation here.

The explanation for this is:

Regrettably, after consulting it with our development team, I found out that uploading ASP.NET themes through administration UI is not supported on Azure (there are certain problems with VirtualPathProvider and the way it stores the files on the blob storage).

The only way to work with themes in an Azure project is to "manually create folders within the ~/App_Themes folder and use a full or web deployment to propagate the changes." This is the path of course I had started down, but assumed I was going about it wrong due to the lack of documentation in the CSS Stylesheets/Theme section of the docs.

FYI the language option appeared after installing the LESS Preprocessor plugin.

Thanks for the help.

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