Theming Your Site: How Themes Work

Customize Your Site's Appearance

SynaptikCMS uses a simple yet powerful theming system that lets you change your site's entire appearance without touching your content.

Installing a theme

Manually

You can place a new theme folder directly into /theme/my-theme/. If you want to create your own theme, read the section below.

The theme appears automatically in Admin → Appearance → Theme Manager.

Zip Upload

Download a theme from the themes page, or zip your newly-created theme folder, then Admin → Appearance → Theme manager → Import Theme.

Switching Themes

In the Admin sidebar, Appearance → Theme Manager : select a theme, click 'Activate' and confirm – your site's appearance updates immediately while your content remains unchanged.

Theme Structure

Each theme is a folder containing template files, stylesheets, and assets:

• header.php
• footer.php
• home.php
• content-articles.php
• content-pages.php
• content-projects.php
• css/style.css

More advanced users can also use partials, page-templates and a functions.php file to add extra features to their theme.

Creating Custom Themes

Copy an existing theme folder, rename it, modify templates and styles, and your new theme appears automatically in Settings. You will also need to edit the theme.json file to add the theme metadata, as well as add a screenshot of the theme named preview.jpg, preview.jpeg, preview.png or preview.webp.

To learn more about creating themes, please see the documentation.

Best Practices

It is highly recommended to keep themes self-contained – meaning that all theme-specific assets should live within the theme folder. Another solid recommendation to make your life easier is to use CSS custom properties for easy color scheme customization.