So You Want to Change Squirrelmail's Default Color Scheme...

Question

I needed to do this, because I'm migrating users to Dovecot over time. In the event they connect to the old webmail site I want it to be obvious, so I changed the background color.
This requires vi or some other plain text editor. Proceed at your own risk.
The file you need to edit is:
/usr/share/squirrelmail/themes/default_theme.php
1) First, make a backup copy.
here's the file, in the event you ignore suggestion #1
<?php
* January 2, 2000
* Theme Name: 'Default Theme'
* This is the default theme that comes standard with SquirrelMail.
* Most of the colors were taken from mail.yahoo.com's theme on their
* site.
* To create a new theme, just copy this file, and edit the colors.
* Be sure to rename the file and keep the original, just in case.
* @author Luke Ehresman
* @copyright © 2000-2007 The SquirrelMail Project Team
* @license <a class="jive-link-external-small" href="http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php">http://opensource.org/lic enses/gpl-license.php</a> GNU Public License
* @version $Id: default_theme.php 12127 2007-01-13 20:07:24Z kink $
* @package squirrelmail
* @subpackage themes
global $color;
$color[0] = '#dcdcdc'; // (light gray) TitleBar
$color[1] = '#800000'; // (red)
$color[2] = '#cc0000'; // (light red) Warning/Error Messages
$color[3] = '#a0b8c8'; // (green-blue) Left Bar Background
$color[4] = '#ffffff'; // (white) Normal Background
$color[5] = '#ffffcc'; // (light yellow) Table Headers
$color[6] = '#000000'; // (black) Text on left bar
$color[7] = '#0000cc'; // (blue) Links
$color[8] = '#000000'; // (black) Normal text
$color[9] = '#ababab'; // (mid-gray) Darker version of #0
$color[10] = '#666666'; // (dark gray) Darker version of #9
$color[11] = '#770000'; // (dark red) Special Folders color
$color[12] = '#ededed'; // (light gray) Alternate color for message list
$color[13] = '#800000'; // (dark red) Color for quoted text -- > 1 quote
$color[14] = '#ff0000'; // (red) Color for quoted text -- >> 2 or more
$color[15] = '#002266'; // (dark blue) Unselectable folders
$color[16] = '#ff9933'; // (orange) Highlight color
?>
2) Change the hex code for the color to the color you want. For example, to change the background from white to a green-blue, replace;
$color[4] = '#ffffff'; // (white) Normal Background
with
$color[4] = '#a0b8c8'; // (green-blue) Normal Background
Here's a list of hexadecimal color codes:
http://www.december.com/html/spec/colorsafe.html
3) Save the file. If you are logged into webmail, reload the page to see the change.
Message was edited by: flatrack

Answer 1

Here's another trick. Say you want to have each user have a specific theme, something other than default. The user specific settings for Squirrelmail are in /var/db/squirrelmail/data. Each user has a file called username.pref, where username = their actual short username. For the user msmith, it would be msmith.pref. For existing users, you can edit the file and add/modify whatever preferences you want. Set up your Squirrelmail like you want it site wide, and look at your pref file for an example. At my site, I want everyone to have the plain blue theme, and to turn off the alternating colors in the message list. Here are the preferences to do that:
altindexcolors=0
chosentheme=../themes/plain_bluetheme.php
I added those two lines to each users pref file, when they log in next they will have the plain blue theme. They can change it in the "Options" if they wish, but day one they get the plain blue theme.
For new users that you create through Workgroup Manager, there is a file in that directory called default_pref. That file is a template Workgroup Manager uses when creating a new user in Squirrelmail, so just add the prefs you want in that file, and each new user gets those preferences automatically when they are created.
There is a plugin that dose something similar called forced_prefs available at the Squirrelmail site, but if you force those prefs, users will not be able to change them if they want. It's also not real simple to use, at least for me. Documentation is pretty sparse as well.