Every theme designed by Claris is still supported. However, when you look in the layout Theme picker you'll only see a few of the modern themes.
What if you want to revive the beauty of Bamboo, or the raw excitement of Electric?
Well, now you can!
( Sorry Windows fans, this technique is a Mac only thing. You may find tools to manipulate clipboard data but pasting into the Theme Manager dialog is not supported on Windows )
If you are prepared to dig into the application bundle and look inside the Application bundle (Right-click or Control-click on the application icon, select "Show Package Contents." Look in Contents/Resources/Themes) you'll find every theme that Claris has supplied with FileMaker. With a little patience, and a good text editor you'll be able to convert the information found in the theme folder into a theme that you can paste into your solution.
How to Revive Classic Themes from the Past
- From the Finder, go to the Applications folder.
- Find FileMaker and open the application bundle (instructions above)
- Select and copy the folder containing the theme that you want to revive.
- On the Desktop, or some other safe workspace, paste the copied folder.
- Open manifest.xml
- Delete the xml declaration
- Change the element
<theme>
to<Theme>
( Title case ) - Add attributes to the
<Theme>
element.- Most of the elements you want are in the manifest.
- platform, group, name, id, version are in the manifest. Create attributes using these elements as the attribute name, and the value as the attribute value.
- id must be renamed to base_id when creating attributes.
- You need to create your own id for your theme. I have been using numbers bigger than 60. Even though it is a number, treat it as a string.
- Three attributes you need to make for yourself are:
1. locale. Can be "en" or local language expressed in two characters
2. base_version. Can be 1 or higher integer
3. internalName. The value will be "com.filemaker.theme.custom.XXX".
4. You will need to replace XXX with a UUID.
5. Replace the hyphens in the UUID with underscores.
- Get first named style element name from the elements. For example
<namedstyles><minimal_drop-down_calendar>
. - Open the CSS file referenced in the
<cssfile>
element - Prefix the style sheet with the default styles comment:
/* Object Styles */
- Find the first instance of the first named style (minimal_drop-down_calendar in this example) and insert the custom styles comment immediately before it:
/* Custom Styles */
- Replace line returns in the CSS with
- Replace tabs in the CSS with
	
- Copy and place the CSS into a tag immediately after the opening element
- Immediately after the closing
</metadata>
tag, insert a base64 rendering of the preview image referenced in the element<previewImage>
. Include the attribute "imageType", e.g.,<previewImage imageType=".png">
. Note that the image type includes the period ".".- Use this command in Terminal to put base64 into the clipboard
cat images/electricPreview.png | base64 - - | pbcopy
- Replace "images/electricPreview.png" with the correct file path
- Use this command in Terminal to put base64 into the clipboard
- Wrap the code in an
<fmxmlsnippet>
element, e.g.,<fmxmlsnippet type="FMObjectList">...</fmxmlsnippet>
- Remove all line returns in the text
- Copy the code to the clipboard
- Using Dan Shockley's fmClipTools convert the XML to an FMObject.
- From the database you want to beautify, open
File > Manage > Themes...
- Paste your theme into the dialog, and save.
- You can now open any other FileMaker database and use the Theme Dialog's Import button to import your revived theme.
Congratulations! You have revived a classic FileMake theme.
Unfortunately this technique doesn't completely recreate the past. For a theme like "Electric" there were a lot of images used to obtain the neon effects. We haven't figured out yet how to include those images in the
fmxmlsnippet
.