Book Image

jQuery UI Themes Beginner's Guide

By : Adam Boduch
Book Image

jQuery UI Themes Beginner's Guide

By: Adam Boduch

Overview of this book

<p>Web applications today generally use at least some JavaScript to enhance the look and feel of the user interface. The jQuery UI toolkit gives web developers a set of widgets as well as a framework for developing and applying themes.</p> <p><em>jQuery UI Themes: Beginner's Guide</em> is for web developers who want to design professional-looking applications that are resilient to change. It is a step-by-step guide that goes beyond showing how to switch themes in a user interface built with jQuery UI and offers developers a practical guide to designing their own themes and gives them insight as to how themes work.</p> <p><em>jQuery UI Themes Beginner's Guide</em> starts with themes in general and why they're important in web applications today. We gradually move forward, covering jQuery UI basics, eventually aiming for a full understanding of the theme framework. The ThemeRoller application is a powerful tool – allowing developers to easily adjust theme settings. In addition to seeing how the ThemeRoller works, we take a more in-depth look at the CSS framework internals allowing readers to develop the ability to adjust themes in ways the ThemeRoller cannot. This includes everything from special effects to theming custom widgets. There is no limit to what your theme can change.</p> <p>Once you've read this book, you'll no only be well-versed in theming jargon, you'll also be able to take one look at any jQuery UI application and understand why and how it looks the way it does.</p>
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
jQuery UI Themes Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action - previewing a theme


It's time for us to preview a jQuery UI theme before we actually download it. We can get an idea of what a theme in the ThemeRoller gallery will look like when applied to widgets:

  • Point your web browser to http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/.

  • Select the Gallery tab in the ThemeRoller section on the right-hand side.

  • Move your mouse pointer over any theme in the gallery. A visual indicator will be displayed.

  • Select the theme thumbnail:

What just happened?

We've just selected a theme to preview from the ThemeRoller gallery. You'll notice that all the sample widgets to the right are instantly updated with the new theme. If we wanted to, we could change our theme selection and the sample widgets are once again updated with the theme changes.

You'll notice that once you make a theme selection, the URL in your address bar is now long and ugly. These are the individual theme settings for the chosen theme being passed to the ThemeRoller page with the sample widgets....