Theme basics

A theme is two things: configuration you edit in the dashboard, and templates that control the HTML. This page is about the first. For the second, see theme development with the CLI.

What lives in the dashboard

Theme configuration — the primary colour, fonts and any custom CSS — is not stored in template files. Edit it under Settings → Themes → Editor. Templates read those values through CSS variables, which is why a colour change ripples across every page without anyone editing HTML.

Colours and fonts

Set your primary colour and your fonts once and they apply everywhere — every page, every form, every public-facing screen. That is the point of holding them in the theme rather than on each page.

Pick colours that work as backgrounds for white text, because that is where your primary colour usually ends up: buttons, headers and banners. A colour that looks good as text is often unreadable behind it.

Custom CSS

For anything the settings do not cover, a theme can carry custom CSS. Use it sparingly — every rule you add is a rule someone has to understand later, and most of what people reach for it to do is better handled by the settings above.

Running more than one theme

An organisation can have several themes. Individual pages can be assigned to different themes, or the entire site can use a single active theme.

When you need a developer

If you want to change the structure of a page rather than its colours — moving a block, adding a section, changing the markup — that’s a template change, and it goes through the CLI workflow. See theme development with the CLI.