Themes

OK.

There are several ways to achieve this - but all of them start with either cloning the original theme, or creating a new theme with boxxie as a parent. This is always good practice when making changes to core themes.

Attached to this post is a new theme for you called minimal and for reference below are the steps I used to create it and how you can develop it further.

1. I opted to create a new theme using boxxie as a parent.
   1. Create a folder called minimal
   2. Add a file called config.php into which I copied the config.php from boxxie.
   3. Edit the minimal/config.php to change the theme name, add boxxie as a parent (canvas and base are already parents for boxxie so leave those there). I also changed the name of the css sheet I was going to use to minimal and specified that all the layout files should be read from boxxie - I think in fact you could get rid of these completely as it would read the layout files from the parent anyway. I have chosen to leave them there in case future development of the minimal theme involves creating its own layout files.
   4. Add a folder called style and inside that a file called minimal.css - this will hold all our css changes to the main theme
   5. Copy the lang folder and contents from boxxie and rename the /lang/en/theme_boxxie.php as theme_minimal.php
   6. Edit the theme_minimal.php file to change the theme name. I also altered the choosereadme section to reflect the theme itself.
2. Create the background images needed - I did this using GIMP and created 2 thin images which would be repeated across the width of the screen
3. Create a folder in the minimal theme called /pix and save the images created in that folder
4. Edit the /style/minimal.css sheet to add the css rules needed for the elements (in this case for the OP here, a gradient background image for the header and for the block header)

The theme structure should look like:

• minimal (folder)
  • lang (folder)
    • theme_minimal.php
  • pix (folder)
    • headerbg.png
    • blockheaderbg.png
  • style (folder)
    • minimal.css
  • config.php (file)

This can be adapted to create a theme based on any core theme as a parent - simply change the references to the parent themes in the config.php file as needed. Oh - and if you are changing the name of this theme then don't forget to rename the theme (folder, config.php, theme_yourtheme.php - rename and change the plugin name inside the file)

To make any other changes to the appearance of the parent (Boxxie), they can then be made by changing the css rules in the minimal.css style sheet in this theme and not in the core theme itself.

To change the look of the gradients provided - edit the images themselves in any good graphics package and resave them in the same location with the same name.

I hope that helps you and many others starting out on editing your themes

Richard

PS. there are other ways to achieve the gradient effect, such as CSS3 - but as that is not recognised by older versions of IE (I think 9 recognises gradients, I'm not sure about 8 and earlier) I have stuck to using the tried and tested background image method for you - feel free to use whatever methods you prefer in your finished theme however!