Jump-Starting Your Theme

You can, of course, develop your theme from scratch, starting with only a blank page and your imagination. That might work fine if you are familiar with PostNuke and the technical ways to integrate content into themes, but if you would rather have some examples and structure to go on, you can get a head start with theme development in a variety of ways.

In Chapter 10, "Themes," you looked at the Xanthia theme system that provides a modular templated structure for developing your site design. You can easily take the pnDefault theme included with PostNuke and modify its templates and configuration to create a new theme. If you are just starting out with PostNuke, this is probably the best way to begin. It doesn't require the install of any third-party modules, and you can tweak the Xanthia themes fairly easily.

After you start getting into more serious custom theme development, you might want to give AutoTheme a try. Xanthia is a great theme engine, and it provides many of the same features found in AutoTheme, but the Xanthia Theme Engine (XTE) included in PostNuke .750 is in its first integrated release and is not nearly as polished as the much older AutoTheme system. Heavily customized PostNuke theme development can be accomplished in AutoTheme faster than in the new Xanthia release, and layout and design options are possible with AutoTheme now that are not yet available to Xanthia themes.

No matter what theme system you end up going with, the fastest way to get a theme going is to use one that has already been developed. Download one of the thousands of example themes available online and load it up. Browse through its template files and code and see how it works. If you find good parts in half a dozen themes that you need for your theme, pull them and combine them.

This method of "sampling" from other themes is quite common with open source code. The point of open source is that development advances faster through the combined efforts of everyone involved. Just place a note in the file saying where you got the code, so next time your own theme is downloaded by someone else, he knows where to look for more good examples.