How to create a theme layer for advanced customization

[afuna]

This entry is a basic how to; it's meant to answer the question "How do you create and use a theme layer" and (very briefly) "What are layers?", "Why use a theme layer?".

The basic settings to customize your theme can be accessed and modified via the Customize Journal Style page. However, if you're doing something more complicated, you may need to modify code snippets or manually set some variables. For these, you will need to know how to create a theme layer and attach it to your style.

First of all, a quick rundown of terms:

A style is what is applied to your journal, and it is made up of several layers. A layout layer is the basic structure or framework of the style. Customizations via the Customize Journal Style page will be saved as auto-generated customizations in a user layer. Any other modifications you make, you should do in a theme layer. A theme layer can contain system-provided default color settings; it can also contain any additional advanced customizations you wish to apply to your journal.

Technically, you can just modify a user layer, and it seems easier to do that, because it's already been created for you and you can skip the few steps required to create and attach a new theme layer to your style. However, this is a bad idea, because hand-edited changes to a user layer may be erased the next time you use the wizard. To be safe, always create a separate theme layer if you need to edit something manually.

• Find your current style information
  
• Create a new theme layer
  
• Copy existing theme layer settings to your new theme layer
  
• Apply the new theme layer to your style
  
• Tips
  

( on with the how to )