The new Theme Builder in Utah is not a secret feature. In fact, if you're like me and you read the docs on release day it's pretty much the first thing you'd have seen in the release highlight list. I've added it to the list of blog posts I'm authoring for the Utah release for two reasons.
First, it's not installed by default. History has shown me that there are a lot of cool out of the box capabilities that organisations miss out on. Often that's because they are not active by default.
Second, it's really very easy to use and makes configuring the next experience UI trivial. Whether you're new to the platform or you've been there and done that, you should have a play with the Theme Builder.
So what does it do and how do you install it? At the highest level, Theme Builder can be used to create, edit and preview new themes for the Next Experience UI. Think, colour schemes, your company logo, fonts. It can be installed from the ServiceNow Store.
What struck me when I first installed and started to use it, is just how quick and easy it was to make and preview lots of changes to the way the Next experience UI looks.
A disclaimer: I am most definitely not the person you want picking your company colour scheme or designing your logo. Just because you can change fonts and the colours of everything doesn’t mean you should.
Before you start, you'll want to make sure you have read the docs and understand the concepts and what the parts of the UI are called. You'll also want to make sure you have company logos and brand colours that you want to use. If like me you are techie, and not arty. You might want to sit down to do the work with a colleague who can support that.
Once you're off though, the wizard type walk through for creating a new theme is really cool. It will allow you to show how the changes you are making will affect the UI on the fly…
It will also let you switch to previewing a workspace. Once you're done with the configuration and you're happy, you can hit the "Apply theme" button and you're done.
Note: once you have created a new theme and applied it to your instance, you need to remember that subsequent changes to it are made live immediately.
When you make your new custom theme active on the instance, a system property gets set "glide.ui.polaris.theme.custom", pointing to that custom theme. If you wanted to revert to the out of the box "Polaris" theme, simply blank out the value in that property.
This property is the key to understanding how you'd have different themes in different instances to differentiate them. I.e. you'd create a theme for each of your instances, and promote them all. The property should point to a different theme in each instance.
One issue I did stumble over in my experimentation, was when swapping out one custom logo for another once it had already been applied to the instance. I had to remove the custom logo altogether, save the theme and then add a custom one back in.
Further reading on the ServiceNow docs site, and your starting point to learn more and get started with Theme Builder:
