Create Your Own Themes - File Maker

What if you want to create your own themes? There doesn’t seem to be any way to do that in the theme selection dialog, does there? Well, a few companies have designed FileMaker databases that can help you create themes that you can then add to your theme library.

Themes are XML-coded documents that FileMaker interprets and uses when creating layouts. The two available FileMaker-based tools essentially walk you through a wizard where you check a bunch of checkboxes and make some color selections in drop-down menus and then export an XML-based theme. Then you simply place the new theme that is created in the FileMaker /Themes folder (it’s in the same folder as the FileMaker Pro application) and relaunch Filemaker to start using the new theme.

The utilities you can use to create themes are Theme Monster and Theme Creator. As of this writing, Theme Creator is freeware.

Now that you’ve got a layout with a few layout parts on it, it’s a good time to learn layout parts: what they are and how to add, modify, and delete them.