[mythtv-theming] mythtv-theming Digest, Vol 10, Issue 3

Robert McNamara robert.mcnamara at gmail.com
Fri Jan 8 05:36:18 UTC 2010


On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 9:30 PM, Justin Garrison <rothgar at 1n73r.net> wrote:
> I have started my theme (but I don't think I will be finished by the
> deadline). But I have a few questions and would like to see if I could get
> some help.
>
> 1. Where do experienced themer's suggest starting when building a theme from
> scratch? I started with the idea of slowly editing other themes until I
> learned the MythUI enough and then edit images/text/etc. to completely
> change a theme but these themes get so big I think I would be better off
> starting from scratch and learning as I go. But if I start from scratch I
> need to start with menu-ui.xml (actually start with base.xml) and work my
> way out. That leads me to my second question.
>

Both are valid, and it's entirely up to you.  I started by making some
edits to default until I got the hang of it, then I threw all that
away and wrote Graphite.  When I wrote Arclight, I learned from the
mistakes of Graphite and designed and coded *all* my widgets over two
days, first thing.  Then *everything* was much more fun and theming a
screen can be done in a matter of minutes, because you are not trying
to design widgets piecemeal as you need them, but simply laying out
elements from an already-complete pool of widgets.

> 2. Is there a way to start the frontend with a specific theme?(such as
> "mythfrontend --theme=mytheme") If I go to the menu -> utilities ->
> apperance... and change the theme there my theme doesn't start because I
> don't have the utilities window themed. All I have themed so far is the main
> menu but I haven't found a way to just see my main menu and then close myth
> and open with another theme.

mythfrontend -O Theme=themedirname

ie,

mythfrontend -O Theme=MythCenter

Enjoy, and good luck,

Robert


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