5 Tutorial - Writing a Theme
Introduction
This set of pages will be a walkthrough of the theme that I wrote, RoboTheme. The current version always will be available here.
I am writing this tutorial for a few reasons. Most tutorials that currently are available for writing MythTV themes involve manipulating an existing theme. While that serves as a good starting point for learning some of the basics of writing themes, it does not translate as well when starting from scratch. Also, none of the tutorials that I have read discuss anything regarding actually designing a theme. I decided to write a tutorial both to document my experiences of writing a theme and to provided some missing guidance on designing a theme from scratch with the new MythUI engine.
With that, let's begin...and we begin at the beginning, before even beginning to design an element. Step one: organization.
MythTV Versions
This tutorial is written with both version 0.24 and 0.25 in mind. Version 0.25 introduces some enhancements to MythUI which are very compelling. Most of those changes will be discussed in the tutorial. The intention is to write a theme that is compatible with version 0.24 but also will work just fine in version 0.25.
That being said, I am developing against 0.24. My commentary regarding version 0.25 is based on the documentation as opposed to actual development experience. Once I finish this tutorial, I will upgrade to 0.25 and review my commentary to ensure that it is accurate.