How To Download and Swap Themes

(The steps here are referenced to Joe Jenett's Simplicity theme. If Joe updates this theme, you may notice some minor differences in the numbering on the screen captures. This uses the Simplicity13 version).

Simply defined, a 'theme' applies one or more templates across your entire Radio weblog, both locally and on your publicly upstreamed site. It defines the 'look and feel' of your weblog. While you can write your own templates, Userland supplies a group of themes when you purchase Radio.

You can also download themes that other members of the community have packaged and swap from your current theme to that new theme. This topic explains how to download and swap such themes.

1. The author of a theme will give you a URL that you can go to in order to download a theme. For this example, go to Joe Jenett's URL as referenced here (this is the same one already cited above).

2. Select 'download theme file' from his site page as shown below. This is clickable text.

3. Choose 'Save' when the dialog box appears.

4. Navigate through the Windows file dialogs until you find the Themes subfolder of your Radio Userland folder. For me, this meant going to my F: hard drive, the Radio Userland folder and then the Themes folder. When you arrive, choose 'Save'. This will place the downloaded theme file into the Themes subfolder.

5. When the download is complete, select 'Close' to exit this stage of the process.

6. Go to the 'Themes' item from the Radio Command Menu at the top of any of your local weblog pages. This will load the page that contains a list of all the themes in your Themes subfolder. The radio button indicating the theme you are currently using will be checked.

7. If upstreaming is on, turn upstreaming off. This way, you can experiment with the different look of any theme without publishing the changes to your public weblog site. Once you have changed a theme and are satisfied with it, you can turn upstreaming on again to broadcast the changes to your public site.

8. To examine a theme in action, select the theme by clicking its radio button. Then select 'Apply Theme' as shown below.

9. Confirm your choice by selecting 'Apply Theme' again when asked.

10. Whoa! Swapping themes may catch you by surprise the first time you try it. Everything is different! Well, like yeahhhh. Remember: you turned upstreaming off. Think about how the new theme looks-and-feels to you. If you like it, turn upstreaming back on to synchronize your local weblog with your public weblog. If you want to wave the new theme bye-bye, repeat steps 7 and 8 but select a different theme from the list.

11. Done. (Well, almost. You may discover that your older Radio pages still retain an earlier theme. You can fix this by forcing upstreaming of all website elements).

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