New to the next release of 5.1 and 5.2 are more streamlined templates. We’ve condensed all the includes and some code into 2 includes to cut the confusion and the clutter. Though a small update, I thought it would be important to let anyone who is developing a theme in Liferay know because some lines of text have been moved around and this could cause some needless frustration.

In portal_normal.vm there used to be a lot of things going on – some lines of css and multiple includes. Well, we’ve found that for the majority of themes people are going to leave these lines alone. Therefore, we've moved code into the general top head and the bottom includes.

So,

$theme.include($top_head_include)

is going to include the folowing code:

#css ($css_main_file)

<script type="text/javascript">
    // <![CDATA[
        $page_javascript_1
        $page_javascript_2
        $page_javascript_3
    // ]]>
</script>

#if ($company_logo != "")
    <style type="text/css">
        /* <![CDATA[ */
            #banner .logo a {
                background: url($company_logo) no-repeat;
                display: block;
                font-size: 0;
                height: ${company_logo_height}px;
                text-indent: -9999em;
                width: ${company_logo_width}px;
            }

            #ie6_png_fix()
        /* ]]> */
    </style>
#end

and

$theme.include($bottom_include)

is now including:

#js ($js_main_file)

So for anyone who has modified or removed those lines and are seeing them in their themes, it is because we’ve made them manditory in all themes. And, for those who have modified portal_normal.vm but not the above code, you should remove the moved code so that they're not included twice.