Creating your theme’s identity is probability the most important part of creating a Firefox theme. You need to ensure your theme doesn’t conflict with anyone else’s and, of course, give it a cool name.

To do this, we’ll need to modify two files inside the iPox Remix Pieces folder; install.rdf and contents.rdf. Each file should be able to be opened by a basic text editor like TextEdit (Mac) or WordPad (Windows)

Inside install.rdf we start by giving our theme it’s own UUID. This is like a fingerprint and it makes each theme unique. UUIDs are simple to get. Just visit http://www.famkruithof.net/uuid/uuidgen and they’ll give you one. Now, replace 11111111-1111-1111-1111-11111111111 with the UUID you acquired from the site above. Keep the numbers inside the {} brackets though.

Under the UUID is the theme’s version number. Feel free to set this to whatever you’d like. That one is for you to make up.

Now lets edit the Front End MetaData area. Give your them it’s name, description, creator, any contributor information and the theme’s homepage URL. You don’t need to modify them all right now, but you probably should before distributing it.

After that is the theme’s internal name. This is tells where Firefox where to put the theme elements when installing. I’d use only letters and numbers here and avoid any spaces or special characters. I usually just put the theme name here, minus any spaces. Ensure it’s unique though as calling it iPox may make it conflict with my iPox theme.

Save and close that file.

Next is the contents.rdf. It’s similar to the install file, but used after the theme is installed to control where things are.

The most important thing here is replace any iPoxRemix text with the theme’s internal name you set in install.rdf. This will tell Firefox where the pieces were put during the install process so it can find them and use them. There are 15 instances of iPoxRemix on this page that must be updated.

Once those are done, just update the author, author URL, and description with your information. Then save it.

That’s it, you’ve given your them it’s unique identity so that Firefox can tell the difference between your theme and someone else’s. Now go ahead and package it and try to install it. It should work!

This is just one installment into the iPox Remix set of tutorials that will help you learn how to create your own Firefox theme. Visit the main iPox Remix page for more details.

Tags: mozilla, theme, tutorial