Creating a Roller theme from scratch

Now things are going to get a little rough; just kidding! In Apache Roller, it's very easy to create your own themes, and in this section I'm going to show you how.

Note

For the following exercises, you'll need to download Chapter 7's support code from the book's website. Extract the chapter07.zip file's contents into a directory in your hard disk. For example, I used Ubuntu Linux in the exercises, created a chapter07 directory inside my Desktop directory, and copied the mytheme directory inside Desktop/chapter07. All the steps in the exercises are based on these assumptions.

Creating a directory for your theme

Every Roller theme has a directory and some required files such as weblog.vm, _day.vm, and theme.xml. The next exercise will show you how to create a directory for your new theme inside Roller's themes directory, and how to copy these required files from the support files.