Support for Wordpress Style Themes

[irvshapiro]

Has anyone done any work on adding Themes to Apostrophe? Full website themes, not just support for “pieces”.

Here is the concept and some background. Currently, there is no true competitor to Wordpress built on a nodejs stack with the performance obtainable from a cloud-first environment. Some of the growth of Wordpress could be attributed to “themes”. The ability to create a website, specifically a blog, in just minutes by leveraging an existing design.

Wordpress themes are widely available and are usable by non-technical or more specifically non-coding users to create sites quickly.

Does a theme capability exist in Apostrophe? If it does/or does not, is it possible to create themes or even a theme system that will not become obsolete when Apostrophe 3.x is release?

Thanks for considering this question – Irv

[boutell]

Hi Irv,

I haven’t seen it done so far, but Apostrophe’s bundle feature is a good choice for distributing a theme because it allows you to distribute many Apostrophe modules that use improve to enhance one of Apostrophe’s standard modules with both styles and code, in a manner that is transparent to developers.

This basically allows you to take your project level lib/modules, such as you might find in a “starter project,” and package it as an npm module for use as a theme — the main difference between the two being that once you clone a starter project and start hacking on it it’s generally too late to get updates, but a theme packaged as a bundle is an npm dependency that can be updated cleanly and it has a clean separation from your own project level code.

This is essentially what Wordpress and Drupal themes promise to deliver, and I think Apostrophe is technically positioned to deliver it very well thanks to the improve feature. I’d love to see folks build themes along these lines.

Actually, in a way it has been done: you could regard the apostrophe-seo module as a theme of sorts, although it doesn’t push any frontend styles.

[fabienc]

Hi,
I’m trying to create my own theme, and package it in a npm module.
Apostrophe extend method are really good for this (even if sometime I get into troubles with it)
Today, what I’ve done so far is : create a theme, create as many widgets as I need (bootstrap grid, countdown timer, different slider,…) and I’m really happy because it working find.

Here is a screenshot of my theme, front, and admin bar, which I’ve put into a off-canvas menu I’m still developing my theme.

I’m not sur to do it the right way, but it’s working.
I still have troubles with my admin bar display when activating my theme from a clean install, but I’ll solve it one day

Fabien

[boutell]

This is cool. If you share the repo I can make suggestions about the best way to package it for reuse.