Add the ability to update colors after deploying a theme SharePoint & Office 365
It would be really nice if there a Guide to or way better commenting in the CSS files for customizing bind tuning templates (SharePoint and Office365 specifically) after deployment in SharePoint that was written kind of like this. http://www.tcs.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/White%20Papers/Best-Practices-for-Designing-Responsive-SharePoint-Site-0514-1.pdf or possibly a tool such as the theme cusomization site that allowed for post deployment updates.
Currently if I deploy a template there isn’t a guide or easy way to change the font style or color without having to go in and override a ton of css manually by looking all the classes and styles up via the dom explorer element by element to find either BT-ID or the CSS Class name. Instead of having to put read from a guide it would be even nicer for there to be a good tool such as your sites customization tool or the SPColor Palette tool to customize the site. Are there spcoolor files used in your template that we could then use the themable tag in CSS to customize? If not, maybe it would be a good idea to convert how you inject your CSS to more of a SP color/ SP color Palette generator way of branding? I know that if I have SP 2013 template that I can go generate the solution with different colors and stuff like that and redeploy by removing completely and reinstalling but its tedious and unacceptable in a live environment. Further, it appears as if Office 365 templates can only be customized one time and then never changed after purchase. Which in the case of my last 2 clients marketing changed there mind after purchase and created a ton of work for me in terms of CSS and i had to do it alll class by class ,item by item, from the lack of guide, tools, etc. If the color palette was used and all the CSS styles were changed to {Thememable) the user could change the themeable tags on the items that they want change default color schemes on or change the color of that thememable item such as accent 1, 2 ,3 etc.
Microsoft DOES NOT want us using master pages in Office 365 going forward so this might be a good step in that direction.
Hi Michael, thanks for sharing your idea. :)
BindTuning concept is based on a pay-per-use idea, so this is the reason why you can only customize your theme before download.
Our themes, for both Office 365 and SharePoint 2013 can be customized using the customization tool before download, or changed manually after download.
For most CMSs we do provide free trial themes, including for SharePoint.
Currently, trials are not available for Office 365, due to a few CMS restrictions, though we are making all efforts to change this and start providing trials as soon as possible.
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Lisa Brown commented
Amazing, Michael!!!
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J. Hawkins commented
Just a suggestion: A token can be embedded in a theme installation that is registered to a specific URL or site IP address. I've done this with a lot of other CMS plugin providers. The short trial period was definitely not long enough for us to make sure we'd gotten the colors, fonts, and styles just right. There are definitely things we would change now that the template is installed, including font size, color, use of caps and small caps in the heading definitions, etc. It can take organizations months to get the branding of their site just right-- so a 7-day trial just isn't long enough.
There are so many other ways BT can make sure customers stick to the pay-per-use rule without restricting our ability to update fonts and colors after we've downloaded the template.