Since it seems a lot of folks with art skills but lack the coding skills to make a mdm theme here might be some suggestions that seemed to work well for making cinnamon, gtk/metacity themes.
Take a mdm already made by someone else, choose the layout that resembles the layout you got in mind for your design and just change the name of it and change the artwork (keeping the size the same, ** this is important**) to your artwork.
No coding invloved, the only thing your doing is changing the artwork itself to your design.
The more layouts that get created by developers in the future the more choices for a layout you'll have to use as a base for art creations, again
no coding involved for this method.
Why miss out showing and sharing your creations because you never learnt how to develop in web design.
Here's how to do it.
Grab a theme already made by someone else.
I'll use one of mine as an example. BlimpCity
Grab the BlimpCity folder from /usr/share/mdm/html-themes/
copy paste it to where you want to work on it.
1: Change the folder name from BlimpCity to a name you want to call your creation
2: open the folder and open the theme.info file
it looks like this inside:
Code: Select all
[Theme]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=BlimpCity
Description=A boostrap HTML theme
Screenshot=screen.jpg
change the name to the same name you renamed the folder, add a description, what the theme is about (keep it very short or it won't all show up in the login preferences) and save it. (leave screenshot alone)
next start making your own artwork creations.
The bg.jpg is the background, if not all artwork is found in the main folder look in the img folder for the rest to change to make your own.
Keep the image extensions the same (example: jpg or png), because they are typed this way in the css files, changing that will not show your image)
If it's an animation sprite sheet make sure you keep the same distance between each image (to figure this out just take the width of the image and divide it by how many images there are, this will give you the width of each image).
Make sure all images are the same size as the original or it will not show all the of the image or leave spaces as the sizes of the images are also coded in the css.
To test your newly created theme:
Open a terminal and type “mdm-theme-emulator”
Click “open” and select your index.html file
Click “Add dummies” to add random users and sessions to your theme
Take a screenshot of it (from the emulator) resize the screenshot to the same size as the screenshot in the main folder and replace that original with your own.
To install your theme zip it up as tar.gz extension, open up the login preferences screen and drag the tar.bz file into the html section and it will install it for you.
Then once done upload it so others can share your creation.
Another method we used to use in the old days is get artist and developers together.
If your a developer that is not an artist offer your skills to the artist who cannot develop but want to make some themes and team up together to make some awesome work together.
Sam