Constructing Personas or themes

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RedDwarf

Constructing Personas or themes

Unread post by RedDwarf » 2015-09-27, 22:19

Does anyone know of any applications which can construct a basic persona or theme without having to go to all the trouble involved in manually constructing one? All I need is an image to identify the browser so I can quickly tell which browser I am using as I use multiple sandboxed browsers.

New Tobin Paradigm

Re: Constructing Personas or themes

Unread post by New Tobin Paradigm » 2015-09-27, 23:24

There are no such programs that do this for you.

RedDwarf

Re: Constructing Personas or themes

Unread post by RedDwarf » 2015-10-03, 18:27

It's a pity as some basic alterations to the theme, or persona as Mozilla likes to call them, would be helpful. ATM I am having to try and use an older Firefox which is compatible with Personas Plus extension in order to check a basic persona, then create on mozilla and wait days for it to be checked and approved. Only to find out it doesn't really work as well as I wanted...then repeat which is becoming very time consuming.

Even after doing that there does not seem to be a way to download it as Mozilla are preventing it. Maybe the chosen license is preventing that like the majority of other themes on Mozilla. None that I have come across can be downloaded.

riiis
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Re: Constructing Personas or themes

Unread post by riiis » 2015-10-03, 20:35

You don't have to upload your custom personas/light themes to AMO, in order to use them. Instead, you can develop and store your custom personas/light themes locally. Instructions for doing so can be found here (See 'Using custom and locally stored persona/light themes'). Note that you will need either the "ThemeTool" or "Persona Switcher" extension to select and use these custom personas/light themes stored locally.

As noted above, light themes are stored in the option item named "lightweightThemes.usedThemes" in your "about:config" file. Also noted, the value of this option item is in json-file format and easily edited. Note that if mistakes are made in editing this value, your persona/light themes may no longer work. Thus, be sure to back up the value of this option item, before making changes to the value of "lightweightThemes.usedThemes"[IMPORTANT]. Restart Pale Moon immediately, after modifying the value of "lightweightThemes.usedThemes" in "about:config".

Light themes include only three mandatory items, and several optional items, as follows (from Mozilla module "LightweightThemeManager.jsm"):

Code: Select all

const MANDATORY = ["id", "name", "headerURL"];
const OPTIONAL = ["footerURL", "textcolor", "accentcolor", "iconURL",
                  "previewURL", "author", "description", "homepageURL",
                  "updateURL", "version"];
If a "footerURL" is not included, the contents of "headerURL" will also be used for the footer/Pale Moon status bar. The "accentcolor" is a solid color used to color the sidebar and the page header and footer, whenever the "headerURL" and/or "footerURL" images are not used or too small. Thus, a theme-compatible "accentcolor" generally should be included in your light theme. The "headerURL" should be 200 pixels high. The "footerURL", if present, should be 100 pixels high. I generally use a "headerURL" only 1152 pixels wide, and no "footerURL", which is adequate for my small screen size and solid-color light themes. But, a much wider image appears to be now normative at AMO (2500 px to 3000 px or more). Thus, a wider image size is now preferred for both header and footer.

Example of custom local light theme:
[{
"id" : "101",
"name" : "Seascape",
"headerURL" : "file:///F:/Personas/101/sea+.jpg",
"accentcolor" : "#3F6276",
"version" : "1.0"
}, {
"id" : "115",
"name" : "DarkscapeLT",
"headerURL" : "file:///F:/Personas/115/dark-.jpg",
"accentcolor" : "#3F6276",
"version" : "1.0"
}
]

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