WARNING: BUILDING THEMES IS AT YOUR OWN RISK!

When you mess with css files you can create a giant mess. Bookmark this url in case things get ugly. It will reset your theme:

http://30boxes.com/index.php?themeUri=/theme/default

Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, time for the good stuff. We have created a system that allows “remote skinning” — yep, you can actually use 30 Boxes and have the customization happen on your web server or even your own desktop computer (pretty neat, huh?)

Our index.php takes an argument called themeUri which tells 30 Boxes where to look for the css file and all of the graphics (buttons and such) to render the site. This means if you try the following url

http://30boxes.com/index.php?theme
Uri=http://www.myserver.com/somedirectory/my30boxestheme/

you will have your calendar running using files in that directory.

If you run IE or Safari, you can point themeUri to a folder on your hard drive. If you run Firefox, you must make a modification described here because Firefox considers that a security risk. Then you would access your theme with something like

http://30boxes.com/index.php?themeUri=file://c:mystuff/mythemefolder

Once you set your theme, you will see it selected as “Custom” under the Change Theme menu. If you change back to one of our hosted themes, you will have to manually type your themeUri in again to reload your theme.

To get started, we have zipped up our three themes so that you can download them and look at what is involved. Start out with global.css where you can make the easiest and most powerful changes. Read the notes and comments for clues, you will be doing a fair amount of “reverse” engineering.

Some tips:

• any css references to background images are absolute and you must rewrite them to point to your folder or url
• we have tried to group things logically, but this css is closer to “alpha” (we also aren’t css wizards, so you may improve it!) and we reserve the right to add classes to the code so we may inadvertantly break your theme but will try our best not too :-)
• we started with the OS X Gray theme and then copied over and modified to make the next two, so a lot of images in those packages aren’t used at all
• bring your questions to the Developers forum
• have fun!

Zip files for download: OS X Gray Theme, Gmail Blue Theme, Flickr White Theme

At some point, we hope to offer up some prizes for great themes.