Theming Guide

Create and Edit Themes

In Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla), a theme is the primary factor that controls your community's aesthetic appearance. Vanilla offers three methods for creating and editing a theme:

Theme Editor
Theme API
File-based Theme

Method compatibility

All Vanilla themes share the same basic structure. This means each of the options described below is compatible with the others, so they can be used in conjunction with one another. For example:

You could create a file-based theme and then copy it in your Dashboard to edit it with the Theme Editor.
You could use the Theme API to download the individual assets of a theme and then continue it as a file-based theme.

Learn more about each method below so that you can decide which is the best method(s) for creating and editing your community themes.

Theme Editor

The Theme Editor is an easy-to-use interface, and is often the best way to update a theme. It's accessible via the Dashboard, and is often used to:

customize a Foundation theme,
add new themes, and
edit existing themes.

To learn about Theme Editor, see:

https://success.vanillaforums.com/kb/articles/279

Theme API

Vanilla offers a full RESTful API for its theming engine, which is intended for use by experienced developers. Typically, you won't create an entire theme via this API, but having it presents some interesting advanced scenarios for customers with a developer resource. For example:

Maybe you have a header that you use across all of your communities and you want to be able to update it everywhere.
Maybe you have several themes for multiple nodes or subcommunities that are mostly similar and you want to write some automation scripts to synchronize them when you make an update.

To learn about the Theme API, see:

https://success.vanillaforums.com/kb/articles/1506-theme-variable-reference?utm_source=community-search&utm_medium=organic-search&utm_term=theme+variable+reference

File-based Theme

📝 NOTE: This option is available only for certain Enterprise customers with a private cluster and developer resources.

File-based themes are a good option if you are a dedicated theme developer and want to use source control, or if you want to take advantage of your own build pipeline.

You can create a theme on your file system and place it in your local \themes folder. Then, you can publish it with Vanilla's Enterprise Theme push feature.

Refer to the articles below to learn about using File-based Themes:

https://success.vanillaforums.com/kb/articles/275

https://success.vanillaforums.com/kb/articles/168

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