Before I begin to describe this "Quick and Dirty" little tool I've put together, I just wanted to send a big congratulations to the entire CKS:EBE team on their 2.0 release. They have put together a fantastic solution, one that, in my opinion, adds essential extensions to the basic SharePoint Blog platform.
Download
The Solution
Over the last couple of months I have been lucky enough to work closely with Heather Waterman from PixelMill on the development of custom themes for the CKS:EBE. The development of these themes often takes place in SharePoint Designer, and when completed they are provided as a set of files in a folder structure. This is fine for a small number of blogs, where the files can be easily added via a drag and drop operation in SharePoint Designer, but for deploying to lots of blogs, this is just not feasible.
What you need to do is turn this folder structure into a SharePoint Feature. You could of course do this manually, but with potentially hundreds of files needing to be added to an ElementManifest you would only attempt this if you enjoyed typing lessons in high school and had 100% accuracy.
Screenshots
Transforms this:
To this:
More importantly, after installing the new feature, add the new theme to your CKS:EBE blog is as easy as clicking: Activate.
And then selecting your theme:
Installation
This is just a single, command-line executable, so download it from here and then get started.
Usage
CKS:EBE Theme Feature Generator
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Usage:
zsThemeFeatureGenerator <ThemeName> <NewFeatureFolder> <CurrentThemeFolder>
| <ThemeName> | Name you would like to give the new Theme |
| <NewFeatureFolder> | New folder where you would like to create the feature. |
| <CurrentThemeFolder> | Name of the folder where the current SPD created theme is located. |
The existing SharePoint Designer theme should have the following folder structure:
\Theme
\Theme\Images
Notes
This is obviously just producing the feature, you would next need to wrap it up into an installable solution file. I stopped here as there are many ways to do this. My current favourite is the SmartTemplates tool, but after seeing it at the conference, I'm going to check out STSDEV.
After you have created the new feature you can obviously tweak it to your hearts content, the beauty is that all that typing is avoided.