Themes (WCMS Part 2)

Themes are just one part of the entire Webcrossing Customization Management Suite, the WCMS. A half dozen or so themes come with the install package, or you can create your own. Themes are a combination of layout and look/feel settings, and can be applied to the entire site, or to just one or more folder hierarchies, allowing for different areas of your site to look different.



Themes can be applied in two ways: choose one from the "Choose Top-Level Theme" page, or import one. Once a theme is applied, you can change any of the hundreds of theme settings to customize it.

Since themes can be exported or imported, it makes it easy to develop a custom theme on your dev server and then move it to production. You can also export a theme before you start fiddling with it, so if you want to just revert to what you had before, you can easily do that.

Theme settings are hierarchical. If you want your subfolders to be identical except for, say, the color of the text in the banner, you can easily do that. If you want your subfolders to look like entirely different sites, you can do that too. Find the "Choose Folder-Level Theme" from the Theme Manager on the Edit Folder page.

Themes can be either "inside" (the historical banner and footer) or "outside" the banner/footer, or off entirely - which provides a great deal of flexibility.



On the main "Edit Theme Settings" page for either a folder or the entire site, you'll find:
  1. A small mini preview of what your theme looks like
  2. Global settings like font size and face, any HTML to go inside the <head> tags, the global stylesheet, date formatting, buttons and icons, and some basic global colors
  3. Layout settings, which pull together all the layout settings from the other various panels
  4. Color settings, which pulls together all the color settings from the other various panels and some built-in plugins
  5. A page each for the banner, the nav, center, and right columns, and the footer. Each of these pages allows you to set dimensions, colors, etc. as well as determine what "widgets" - for lack of a better word - should be put where. "Widgets" can be:
    • Admin-defined HTML fragments, which can contain WCTL scripting
    • Content blobs from the Content Management plugin
    • Content provided by various plugins, like sidebar polls
    • Other interface widgets provided by the WCMS system such as login/logout links, the time and date, a simple round-robin image rotator, and the like
  6. A page of settings for the WCMS interface widgets
  7. Links to export and import your theme
Themes may not be the best way to go if you have to match an example site exactly to provide a seamless experience for your users going to and from the Webcrossing portion of your site, but if that's not a requirement and you don't have a design team and aren't in a position to do any scripted customization, themes are going to be a great deal of help.
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