Mark Wagner wrote a hugely valuable post on how to apply a theme across all subsites, without having to muck about with the master page stuff (and frankly, most of my clients just want it to look a little different and don’t need mass customization). To avoid risking having Mark move or retire his article, I’m posting it here as well (with a reference back to him of course).http://www.crsw.com/mark/brainlitterarchive/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=39Apply a Theme to all sub sites in SharePoint 2007works for MOSS 2007 only, not WSS 3.0
Apply a Theme to all sub sites:
(works for MOSS 2007 only, not WSS 3.0)
- Change the top site to the theme of your choice using the normal method in Site Actions > Site Settings > Site Theme.
- Navigate to the top site to see the newly applied theme.
- View the HTML source of the SharePoint page using the theme you want.
- Look for a link tag containing the .css file for the applied theme. It will look something like this:
- Copy the href value to your clipboard or to a text file if you like. It should look something like:
/apps/afe/_themes/Belltown/Bell1011-65001.css - On your top level site, go to the Site Actions > Site Settings > Master Page screen.
- Scroll to the bottom where the Alternate CSS URL section is. Select the “Specify a CSS file…” option.
- Paste the path copied from the href above into the text box.
- Check the Reset all sub-sites to inherit this alternate CSS URL option.
- Click OK.
- Navigate to your sub-sites and verify the theme has been applied.”