Theme Management API

This is an initial attempt at hashing out a secure, reliable Theme Management API. One of the main goals is to modify as little as we can of stock Palm files.

Create a new theme folder in /media/internal/.themes/thisTheme/
Create a new theme_config.json file in that folder which contains the following:

{ 
  themename: Display name for theme
  themedesc: quoted text of html for description of theme 
  app:
  {
    { com.palm.package1: { icon: relative/path/to/icon, cssFileName: relative/path/to/css },
    { com.palm.package2: { icon: relative/path/to/icon }
  },

  global:
  {
    cssFileName: relative/path/to/global/css 
  },

  wallpaper:
  {
    relative/path/to/background/file
  }
}

paths are relative to the folder thisTheme.

In your theme override stylesheets references to your images that override the default images should refer to /var/activetheme/... not to /media/internals/.theme/mytheme

When your theme is chosen as the active theme, the system will symlink YOUR theme directory to /var/activetheme.

A one-time patch will be made against the framework files in /user/palm/framework which will add loading /var/activetheme/<orig_path>/XXX.css after each reference to <orig_path>/XXX.css and which will modify launcher so that when an application is loaded, after appname.css is loaded, /var/activetheme/<app_dir>appname.css will be loaded -- matching CSS classes from those files will then automatically override the previous ones from the defaults.

Writing the theming css files

Theming css files must be "sparse" that is, they ONLY contain the classes being overridden not the entire global css file. So, if for example you are overriding the "button_one" class in the phone application css, your theme.css in /thisTheme would be /usr/palm/applications/phone/stylesheets/theme.css and would contain ONE class

{button_one: 
   background-image: /var/activetheme/yadayadayada/1.png
}

NOTE NOTE NOTE -- I know that's wrong -- I'm trying to get an Idea out here ok?

Theme Management app

The theme management app iterates the folders in /media/internals/.themes and comes up with a list of themes folders in there.
It then opens each of the themeinfo.json files and displays a list of the available themes.
Upon tapping on a theme name a descriptive page (stolen from preware) comes up and displays the thumbnails and description and otherdata with an INSTALL button
Upon pressing install, the theme app's service symlinks /media/internal/.themes/chosenTheme to /var/activetheme

The Theme Management App also displays a command button which says something like: Get more themes. which accesses the compatible themes feeds. Any theme-manager compatible feeds are displayed using code which we steal from Preware.

The theme manager app can call the preware file service to get the theme feeds information.

It does NOT download the feeds by default, only on request by pressing "get more themes."

When a theme downloads, it extracts into /media/internal/.themes if the theme manager app attempts to open themedata.json and there isn't one, or it is corrupt, it informs the user that "this is not a theme manager compatible theme, sorry." and calls the service to delete the folder created by the IPK.

Theme Management API