Slug: customizing-stylecatcher-themes-in-movable-type Date: 2008-09-10 Title: Customizing StyleCatcher Themes in Movable Type layout: post

This post is a reminder/bookmark for myself and anyone else on how to customize a StyleCatcher theme in Movable Type without losing the ability to use the original theme in the future.

Background: Movable Type has an great plugin called Stylecatcher that makes it easy to install new CSS-based themes on your blog. StyleCatcher installs these themes in a directory in mt-static:

mt-static/support/themes/<theme-name\>/

I started this blog on Byrne Reese’s excellent port of Chris Pearson’s Cutline theme. And I originally started editing these files (particularly the cutline.css file) as part of my customization process. After having some problems with the code, I decided to setup another test blog and apply the original Cutline theme for comparison.

When I went to do so, I realized that I only had the one local copy of the theme. So after some fiddling around, i realized that there’s an easy way to have your cake and eat it too.

Long story long

1. Copy the <theme-name\> directory and give it a new name (mine is now monkinetic-x)
2. Rename the CSS file inside to match.
3. Edit the meta data in the comments at the top of the CSS file:

  /*
  A theme adapted by Steve Ivy from the theme adapted by Byrne Reese from the original Cutline theme by Chris Pearson
  name: Monkinetic X
  designer: Steve Ivy, based on Cutline by Chris Pearson
  layouts: layout-wt, layout-tw
  */

Now the theme will appear in the “Saved Themes” section of the StyleCatcher, and you can use the original theme as a backup in case you (like me) break something. Good luck!