Theme builder themes or built in Skins

[Andy Green]

Just wondering which is better for performance to use embedded skins, or create using theme builder and use a custom skin.

I prefer to use a custom skin as I can tweak the css to suit, rather than target the correct specificity to change an inbuilt skin.

What I used to do was take the skin form the skin folder and rename / edit that, but have found that using the Theme builder files the CSS doesn't match exactly the built in skins, so I'm thinking about going back to the built in, but curious about performance.

 

Andy

[Rumen]

Hi Andy,

The Telerik CDN is hosted on the Amazon CloudFront service and the use of the embedded skins is likely to be the fastest approach since Amazon has servers all over the World.

Best regards,
Rumen
Progress Telerik

[Andy Green]

Thanks Rumen.

I should have said, the site runs on intranet with no WWW access so all files will be served up locally.

 

Andy

[Rumen]

You are welcome, Andy.

Thank you for specifying that this is an intranet app without access to the Internet.

There isn't a huge difference between the loading speed of the controls specific CSS files generated by the Theme Builder and the ones available in the Skins folder. Regardless of which CSS files you choose to customize (the TB or the ones in the Skins fodler) you might want to:

• use Lightweight rendering (RenderMode="Lightweight")
• enable the stylesheet combining, because the resource combination will result in a single request for the Telerik controls base stylesheets on each page that can be cached aggressively by the browser, as opposed to a number of different files that may not all be already cached:
  
  
  

  <telerik:RadStyleSheetManager ID="RadStyleSheetManager1" runat="server" EnableStyleSheetCombine="true">
      <StyleSheets>
          <telerik:StyleSheetReference Path="~/Skins/Flom/Calendar.Flom.css" />
          <telerik:StyleSheetReference Path="~/Skins/Flom/ComboBox.Flom.css" />
          <telerik:StyleSheetReference Path="~/Skins/Flom/Grid.Flom.css" />
      </StyleSheets>
  </telerik:RadStyleSheetManager>

Best regards,
Rumen
Progress Telerik