About Themes

Themes define the general look-and-feel of a site, including content, appearance, and behavior. A theme provides visual consistency between the pages in a site.

Designing a new theme means specifying the layout, style, sample content, navigation, and all the basic information that serves as a starting point for a new site. Theme designers set the expectations for how a site will look and behave. A theme should be designed keeping in mind the way it will be used; for example, most or all users will be expected to access the site with a mobile device. Designing custom themes is useful if you have users who want to create many similar sites. You can design a theme using page layouts for common patterns that can be shared across themes.

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A theme contains page layouts that are used to design content, appearance, and behavior for sites. You change the design and settings, and add content, to create a site that sells your style, your brand, and your vision.

A theme includes:

Assets for background images or other content that are part of page layouts (images, JavaScript files, and so on)
Style settings for a site (CSS)
Several page layouts (HTML files)
Code to construct navigation for the site (JavaScript files)
A list of basic styles that can be used with the components (specified in design.css and design.json files)

A theme also can include seed data, which is used to populate a new page created from one of the page templates. For example, a user creates a new page for a Products section and chooses the page layout called new_product.html. If the theme contains a file called new_product-pageseed.json, the new page will be populated with the contents of the page seed file when it’s first created. As with sample content, this seed data can be modified and is only there to provide a starting point for you to build out the page.

You can create a theme that uses a subset of components that are intended to work with that theme. When a user chooses that theme for their site, they’ll see only the components that are specified for that theme. See Associate Components with Themes.

Each website uses a theme. When you create the site from a template, you inherit the theme from the template. You can change the theme for a site at any time. Oracle Content Management provides a number of templates with themes that you can use to get started.

If a site uses a new, unpublished theme, the theme is automatically published with the site when you place the site online for the first time. If you make changes to a theme and want to update online sites to show the changes, you must explicitly publish the theme. Only the theme owner or a user with manager privileges can explicitly publish a theme.

Note:

If you publish changes to a theme, all online sites that use the theme will reflect the change. For example, if you change the default font specified in the theme and publish the theme, all sites that use the theme will use the new default font.