Themes in e107

What is a Theme?

Back in the mid 1970s, programming code became so immense that changing even the smallest part of a piece of code could have unpredictable effects in the other areas of the program. This led to the development of a concept called modular programming, which essentially broke the program down into smaller more manageable junks that were called upon by the main program when needed. The term for modular programming these days is separation of concerns or SoC. But no matter what you call it, this is its function.

In e107 a theme contains a set of modular code containing XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). In its most basic explanation, XHTML allows us to take a text document, create a link to other documents, and the eXtensible part of the language allows you to create your own tags describing data. Thus a program like e107 can use these tags to extract the information it needs. The data shouldn’t show up on the screen like a computer printout; CSS is employed to define the layout of the various elements and tags such that they may be viewed with consistency by all browsers. The screenshot below shows you the theme files that are available in e107 on the left, and the typical files and folders that make up a particular theme on the right.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words so I have used the PHP code that makes up the Reline theme, which is what we are using for our front end. Open up your FTP client and go to /public_html/e107_themes/reline/. Locate the file theme.php and use your FTP client’s view/edit feature to open the file. As you can see, there is a fair amount of work that goes into creating a theme. If you want to design your own themes, I strongly recommend that you are thoroughly familiar with PHP, XHTML, and CSS before making the attempt.

We won’t be tackling theme making in this article. We completely need a different book for that subject; however, if you have the knowledge and want to create your own theme you can find information in the WIKI at http://wiki.e107.org/?title=Creating_a_theme_from_scratch. But I wanted to show you that these themes take effort so you will appreciate those who take the time to develop themes, especially those who develop themes and share them at no charge. Remember to thank them, encourage them, and offer to send a little money if you like the theme and can use it. It is not a requirement but it encourages more development.

Understanding the Theme Layout

The first thing you can to do is log in as administrator and select Admin Area | Menus. The screenshot below shows the correlation between the areas displayed on the administrator’s menu items control page and those on the non-administrator page.

Psychology of Color

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to choose their theme based on their personal preferences for layout and colors. You can have the perfect layout and great material on your site and yet, people will just not like the site. So you need to ask yourself, “why do people not like my site?” or “why aren’t they buying from my site?” The answer is probably that your theme uses a color that is sending out a very different message to your viewers’ brains. This is a subject of protracted discussion and there are college courses on this subject. Professionally it is referred to as psychology of color. Your best bet for online information on colors is at http://www.pantone.com.

Selecting a Theme

Sometimes, the default theme does not quite convey the style you want for your site. While functionality is always the primary consideration, it does not mean that you have to abandon your sense of style just because you are using a CMS. There are three types of themes available for e107. These are the core themes, additional themes (located at http://www.e107themes.org), and custom themes.