jQuery Cookbook

Chapter 15. jQuery UI Theming

Maggie Wachs

Scott Jehl

Todd Parker

Patty Toland

(Filament Group, Inc.)

Introduction

One of the advantages of jQuery UI is its ease of integration into such a wide range of websites and applications. And a major factor for successful integration is the ability to apply a look and feel to jQuery UI widgets that’s consistent with a larger site or system design.

jQuery UI is expressly designed to make custom theming easy. You can create highly customized visual styles for your widgets—that automatically include not only colors and textures but a full complement of interaction states—using the following:

• The jQuery UI CSS Framework, a comprehensive set of CSS classes for applying consistent styles and behaviors across widgets

• ThemeRoller, jQuery UI’s tool for theme creation

Together, they provide ways to easily and consistently change the look and feel of both official jQuery UI widgets and your own custom components so they blend seamlessly with your site or application.

This chapter focuses how to get the most out of these tools, whether you’re using them to customize an official jQuery UI widget or incorporating them into your own custom development workflow. We’ll start with a summary of the jQuery UI CSS and how it works with ThemeRoller, and then we’ll present four theming recipes in this order:

1. Styling jQuery UI widgets with ThemeRoller

2. Overriding jQuery UI layout and theme styles

3. Applying a ThemeRoller theme to non-jQuery UI components

4. Referencing multiple themes ...