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: create a folder inside the theme folder (theme/my-theme/), then add a file called theme.json.

To be valid and detected, a theme folder needs to contain the following files: header.php, home.php, footer.php and css/style.css. The theme appears automatically in Admin → Appearance → Themes.

ZIP upload: zip the theme folder (the ZIP must contain the folder, not just the files), then Admin → Appearance → Import Theme.

Switching Themes

In the Admin sidebar, Appearance > Themes : select a theme and save – 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 (and also partials and page-templates for more advanced users).

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.