You can now create your own custom themes based on the beautiful and professionally-designed DevExpress ASP.NET themes.
This new feature is part of the DevExpress ASPxThemeBuilder tool in the 14.1 release.
The DevExpress controls can be styled at a very granular level. This is great if you want total control. However, most customers simply want to use a certain color or change the base font with the controls. And until the 14.1 release, our ThemeBuilder tool did not make it easy to change the base color or font.
An elegant solution
The ASPxThemeBuilder now allows you to create your own beautiful themes that are based on the DevExpress themes.
We've added a new parameters section to the ASPxThemeBuilder tool that let's you set the base font set/size and the base color:
There's only 4 themes right now that support setting the base color and those are our new CSS3 based themes: Metropolis, MetropolisBlue, Moderno, and a new theme that you'll about soon:
Once you select your base font and color parameters, you give the theme a new name. Then click OK and the ASPxThemeBuilder will generate a new theme. You can still customize the theme further if you want to:
Finally you can create a theme assembly with the ASPxThemeBuilder and then apply it to your web project. Theme assemblies are great because they're good for performance and they can be easily shared between projects.
Here's a sample site with the DevExpress MetropolisBlue theme:
This is the theme I created from the MetropolisBlue theme that uses a different base color and font:
Personally, I like the font and color from the original MetropolisBlue over my new version. But maybe I just need to take off my Ray-Bans before choosing a color. :)
Moderno calculates
If you create a custom theme based on our Moderno theme then the ASPxThemeBuilder will use colors that are calculated on the base color. These other colors will have the same hue but different brightness and saturation.
Of course, all the themes will allow you to change the base font. However, and as I mentioned above, only these four new CSS3 based themes will allow you to change the base color: Metropolis, MetropolisBlue, Moderno, and a new theme that you’ll hear about soon.
You can still customize each control to a very granular level, if you want to. However, this approach lets you take one of our beautiful and professional themes and add your font and color customization to it.
WebForms and MVC!
The DevExpress ASP.NET Themes are supported for both ASP.NET WebForms and MVC!
