Creating a Theme Project

The rest of this Learning Path assumes you’ve followed the instructions for setting up Liferay IDE or Liferay Developer Studio. If you’ve done that, you’re ready to begin!

1. Select File → New → Liferay Plugin Project.

2. In the Project Wizard, enter lunar-resort-theme for the Project name and Lunar Resort Theme for the Display name. Leave the build type as Ant and select the proper Plugins SDK and matching Liferay runtime.

3. Select Theme for the Plugin type and click Next

4. Leave the Theme parent and Theme framework as _styled and Freemarker and click Finish.

Figure 1: The Project Wizard makes it easy to build a theme.

Note: The first time you create a project, make sure you’re online. In the background, Liferay’s Plugins SDK downloads several necessary JAR files. This keeps the initial Plugins SDK download small, but it may take several minutes to create your first project. Subsequent projects are created almost instantly.

You’ll now see your project in the Package Explorer on the left. What you’ve just done is create a blank Liferay theme based off of Liferay’s _styled theme.

Rather than build a theme from scratch, it is best practice to use a Liferay base theme as a starting point to ensure full compatibility. The changes you make to the theme override the default settings of the _styled theme.

You can learn about the theme’s anatomy next.