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When creating a custom Control Panel theme, with the help of an override.css file, the easiest way is to make a copy of the default theme's image folder and put that in your theme directory. Then, make changes to the images located in that folder.
If you like to give away or sell a custom theme, how do you distribute the images folder (since I guess all icons not changed by you is licensed by EllisLab) and still make it a easy install?
As I understand it, the principle over the override is that you only include files/images and include changes - the rest are inherited from the parent (default) theme.
Therefore, you don't need to include all of EL images with it.
I can't speak to the legality of distributing the images from the default CP theme. I'd say that's a question to pose to EllisLab directly.
But you can add an override.css to piggy-back off the default CP theme styles and images. That's how the NSM Override.css theme works.
Since NSM Override v1.2.0, they store all CSS and images in a separate folder, themes/cp_themes/nsm_override. To install it you to only add one line, an @import rule, to the override.css file in the default theme folder:
@import url("../../nsm_override/css/screen.css");
We use 'Default' as our control panel theme and override it. We keep the same theme on all of our clients sites, and often make improvements and enhancements to it.
To aid with this, we adopt the NSM_override method of simply importing an external CSS file from override.css but go a step further by actually hosting it elsewhere (in our case a special domain where we keep this kind of stuff).
@import url("http://topsecret.com/custom_cp/loader.css");
This way it takes seconds to add to a new site and all of our sites get improvements at once.
It's never popped up, but if a client wanted their own bespoke changes we would probably import our loader.css as normal but then continue our overrides below, so for example....
@import url("http://topsecret.com/custom_cp/loader.css");
body {
background: green;
}
All of this is a round-about way of saying that you don't need to comply with the EE file structure to manage your custom themes. You can continue to use EllisLab's images by simply referencing their standard location or you can use your own. Because everybody has 'Default' there's no need to re-distribute.
