Change the Theme of the Site
Overview
The theme is the overall "look" of the site. In some situations you might want to make a temporary change of the theme of the site to correspond to a specific event. One example could be to make a Christmas theme as the holidays approach.
Create new folder
Create a new physical folder, where you can place the templates containing the new layout.
Copy the templates that you wish to have the new theme to this folder.
Make the necessary changes to the templates.
Define the new folder in the administration interface by selecting "Templates -> Folders" in the menu.
On the folder maintenance page press "Insert" and enter the following values on the next page:
- Content - a textual description of the content of the folder.
- Template path relative to root - the relative path to the new folder.
- URL reference for resources - where the images etc. used by the templates can be found.
- URL reference for JavaScript resource - where the java script files used by the templates can be found.
- URL for style sheets (CSS) - where the style sheets used by the templates can be found.
After entering the above values, press "Insert".
More about the folder maintenance can be found here.
Add new folder to folder lists
After changing the templates and defining the new folder in the administration interface you must make the new templates available for the users by adding the new folder to the relevant folder list(s).
Which folder lists you must add the folder to depends on which users you want to show the theme to.
Use the menu item "Templates -> Folder List" in the administration menu to go to the folder list maintenance page.
For each folder list you want to modify do the following:
Select the folder list in the grid. Press "Update".
This starts a wizard, which will make it possible for you to add the new folder.
On the first page just press "Next".
On the next page shown (containing the list of folders used by the folder list) press "Add" to add the new folder to the folder list.
A grid containing all of the folders in the site is shown. Select the new folder.
The folder will have been added to the end of the folder list. To make this the folder the primary folder use the "Move Up" button for the new folder until it is at the top of the folder list (or above the folder, which contains the corresponding templates).
Press "Finish" to finalize the new content of the folder list.
Comments
Please note that using this approach you will not have to make a theme for all of your templates, if a template is not present in the new folder, the template in the original folder is used.
This also means that even if you forget to style one or more templates, the site will still work - although with the old theme for some pages.
In many cases you'll want to be able to test the new theme before making it public. This is also done using folder lists. You can read more about how to do this here.