History: Three Ways to Make a New Theme
Preview of version: 13
File arrangements
First, establish the basic file arrangement of your new theme. (See also Theme Options ).
First steps
- Pick a name for the theme. Check the themes directory to make sure there's not an existing theme (i.e., themes/NewThemeName/css/NewThemeName.css file) with the same name.
- There is no authoritative register of Tiki theme names but, if you intend to share your theme, it would be good to check at themes.tiki.org and in the standard Tiki download package to make sure no theme already exists with the same name.
CSS file
There are several ways to add a new theme to a Tiki site.
- Create or locate a new CSS file that is a variant of a bootstrap.css file. For example, this can be produced at http://getbootstrap.com/customize. Then select "Custom theme by specifying URL" in the "Theme" selector of the Look and Feel admin page. Enter the URL of that file in the "Custom theme URL" field, or
- Create a new CSS file with the theme name you chose and place it (using a file transfer application, etc.) in its own subdirectory of the themes directory. As of Tiki 14, the themes directory contains a subdirectory (folder) for each theme, which in turn contains at least a css directory (like themes/NewThemeName/css/newtheme.css). This is the best choice especially if the theme has images, icons or other components. (See CSS Overview for more details.)
Tiki uses basically two stylesheets to produce the layout and look of the site. One is tiki_base.css, which covers things that are unique to Tiki or otherwise outside the scope of bootstrap.css. The other, because Tiki now incorporates the Bootstrap CSS framework, is essentially a bootstrap.css variant. "Bootstrap" stylesheets made for other web applications such as Wordpress may be able to be used with Tiki but probably the HTML they were written for is quite different from Tiki's, so some modification will be necessary. We will test and document this in the near future.
See also Organization and details of Less files if you want to use the Less CSS pre-compiler to produce a Tiki theme.
Template (.tpl) files
- If at all possible, you should try to use the default template (.tpl) files for your new theme, since having custom files makes it harder to update your theme when the default files are upgraded. But if your new theme does use its own variants of the default templates, these must be placed in a sub-directory in the new theme's directory (like themes/NewThemeName/templates/).
- Copy any files that you want to modify from the templates directory or from an existing theme's templates directory to your theme's templates directory. These will be used in place of the default Smarty .tpl files.
Once its CSS file is in place, your new theme has been added to your site. If you go to the Look and Feel admin page or User Preferences and check the drop-down menu for Theme, you'll find your theme listed.
See next: CSS Overview and Template Overview.
Related information
Allow users to set the theme
On Admin > Look and Feel (Theme tab) you can activate "Users can change theme"__.
Once activated users can change their theme in their Preferences page under My Tiki menu.
Under Modules you can also activate the switch_theme module which makes it very easy for any user to change themes.
Using multiple themes on your Tiki site
http://www.doc.tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php?page=Theme+Control at doc.tikiwiki.or describes how to assign themes to
- A Tiki category
- A Tiki section
- An individual Tiki object (i.e., an individual wiki page, blog, gallery, etc.)
If you enable Theme Control, you will see a link to Theme Control in the Admin section of the application menu.
User groups can also be assigned a specific theme. Check doc.tiki.org for details.
(from http://doc.tiki.org/tiki-index.php?page=Styles and Themes)