Choosing a starting theme #

This page is for designers and project managers at the start of a site project. It answers: should the new look be built from nothing, or on top of a design this installation already has, and which one.

Contents #

1. The four ways to start
2. Decision table
3. Start from scratch
4. Start on top of simple or ezwebin
5. Start from media or starter
6. Whatever you choose

The four ways to start #

1. From scratch: your own design with its own pagelayout, falling back only to standard (and base).
2. On top of a classic design: simple (extension sevenx_themes_simple) or ezwebin in your AdditionalSiteDesignList[], so you inherit their content views and only change what you need.
3. On top of a layouts-based design: media (extension sevenx_themes_media) or starter (extension cjw_themes_jumper), which draw pages with the layouts editor's zones and blocks.
4. A fork: copy a theme extension under a new name and change it freely (covered in the life cycle pages of this help).

Decision table #

Start from scratch #

What you get: full control, no unused CSS or JavaScript, markup you know line by line.

What it costs: you write the pagelayout, the menu, the breadcrumb and the full and line views of every class the site shows. Everything else falls back to design/standard, whose markup is plain and unstyled.

Settings:

[DesignSettings]
SiteDesign=mytheme
AdditionalSiteDesignList[]
AdditionalSiteDesignList[]=standard

This is what the starter siteaccess of this installation does (its design starter with only standard below it).

Start on top of simple or ezwebin #

What you get: working templates for the ezwebin family of classes (articles, blogs, galleries, events, products, forums), a header and footer, paging, search pages.

What it costs: their markup and class names come with them; your CSS styles their HTML. Their stylesheets are loaded through CSSFileList[]; leave them out by giving your design its own page head template.

Settings:

[DesignSettings]
SiteDesign=mytheme
AdditionalSiteDesignList[]
AdditionalSiteDesignList[]=simple
AdditionalSiteDesignList[]=ezwebin
AdditionalSiteDesignList[]=standard
AdditionalSiteDesignList[]=base

Copy only the templates you want to change into mytheme, at the same path.

Start from media or starter #

What you get: complete, modern designs with many view templates, the layouts editor's block templates and a tested responsive and accessible frame.

What it costs: they are large (the media design has several hundred templates and about 166 override rules, by its own README) and depend on their content classes (ng_* classes of the media site data). They suit sites that use that content model.

Whatever you choose #

• To do: Keep your design in an extension of your own (Design extensions).
• To do: Never edit the files of a shipped or Composer-managed theme; override them from your design instead.
• To do: Plan dark mode, right-to-left and accessibility from the first stylesheet, not at the end (Design tokens, Right-to-left designs, Accessibility basics for themes).
• To do: Decide early whether pages are composed with the layouts editor; it changes the pagelayout.

Related pages #

• The themes on this installation
• Tutorial: create a theme extension
• Free documentation: this page is free to copy, translate and improve under the GNU FDL 1.3.