Trinkit, Thinking Web Solutions

Sometimes when updating a custom theme it can be really difficult to get your changes to take effect.

Normally the process to update a theme would be something like:

1. Copy new theme files to theme directory
2. Change selected theme to any other theme in site settings
3. Perform an IISRESET
4. Re-apply theme in site settings

However, sometimes no matter how hard you try it just won’t update. In fact even if you manually update the cached theme css file in SharePoint Designer (in the _themes dir) it just reverts back to the previous version.

Turns out there is an extra step after copying your theme files in. You need to update the version settings in the theme.INF file. If I was changing this for the SIMPLE theme I would find the file to edit in the following directory:

And the values that need to be updated are highlighted below:

I normally just increment the numbers each time as with any versioning.

Follow the rest of the steps and you should have no trouble.

Here are a couple of related resources:

• How to create a custom theme
• 10 New themes released by Microsoft
• SharePoint Branding Tool