Ext Themes in ColdFusion 8

My good friend Todd Sharp asked me to keep this one quiet until his presentation but he blogged about it today so the cat is out of the bag. Ever since ColdFusion 8 came out one thing users wanted to do was change the look and feel for the Ajax components. People have hacked away at the css with no easy answer.

The answer was there all along though. Basically themes in Ext are a css file that point to a different images collection folder. So if you want to change themes simply point to a new css file. If you look in the /CFIDE/scripts/ajax/resources/ext/css folder you should see a a couple themes. The one that all of the Ext examples uses is the aero theme. Simply link the stylesheet in your application and you should be ready to go.

This is great but it does not stop there. This won't just change windows it will change all of the Ext components in ColdFusion 8. With 1 line your windows, grids, layouts etc.. will take on a nice look. Now let say your like me and you still want more themes. If you head over the the Ext Forums you will find user contributed forums. To use our new themes simply drop the css file in the folder we talked about above and the images folder for the theme under /CFIDE/scripts/ajax/ext/resources/images. I have a quick look at some theme changes below.