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About themes and the Theme Builder

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OpenCities Product Team

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This task is for users with the following roles: OC Site Designer.

Your site's theme is a fundamental aspect of your website. Themes dictate the look and feel of your site and how your content gets laid out on your homepage. These aspects help your community access your site's critical information and services. 

We'll work with you to build a theme you love when we create your site. However, if you have developers on staff, you can make or customize themes using the Theme Builder in your admin.

We strongly recommend that you delegate theme customization to an experienced front-end developer. Anyone attempting to create or edit themes should have strong developer experience, including skills in HTML and CSS, an understanding of how a CMS operates, and accessibility (WCAG 2.1). An appropriately qualified front-end developer will test and maintain your customized themes for accessibility compliance, usability, and cross-browser and device support.

the Themes tab in Site Management

With the Theme Builder, you can:

  • Build a homepage layout
  • Choose styles for many page elements within your site
  • Add your own custom Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript
  • Add any files you might need (such as a sprite sheet)
  • Change your navigation menu style
  • View earlier versions of the theme or even revert to a previous version
  • Preview themes on multiple sites

Once you're happy with a theme, you can publish and apply it to one or multiple sites, or you can save it to work on it later. You can also copy themes and import or export them.

What next?

There are many things our theme builder can do, but we recommend reading all of the articles in this section before you get started:

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