About themes and multitenancy

Themes provide templates for the customization of the appearance and functionality of your public-facing websites. Themes can also be translated to support multiple written languages and regional dialects.

The Superdesk Publisher themes system is built on top of fast, flexible and easy to use Twig templates.

By default, themes are located under the app/themes directory. A basic theme must have the following structure:

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ExampleTheme/               <=== Theme starts here
    views/                  <=== Views directory
        home.html.twig
    translations/           <=== Translations directory
        messages.en.xlf
        messages.de.xlf
    screenshots/                <=== Theme screenshots
        front.jpg
    public/                 <=== Assets directory
        css/
        js/
        images/
    theme.json              <=== Theme configuration

Publisher does not support the option of Sylius theme structure to have bundle resources nested inside a theme.

Superdesk Publisher can serve many websites from one instance, and each website tenant can have multiple themes. The active theme for the tenant can be selected with a local settings file, or by API.

If only one tenant is used, which is the default, the theme should be placed under the app/themes/default directory, (e.g. app/themes/default/ExampleTheme).

If there were another tenant configured, for example client1, the files for one of this tenant’s themes could be placed under the app/themes/client1/ExampleTheme directory.

Superdesk Publisher provides an easy way to create device-specific templates. This means you only need to put the elements in a particular template which are going to be used on the target device.

The supported device types are: desktop, phone, tablet, plain.

A theme with device-specific templates could be structured like this:

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ExampleTheme/                   <=== Theme starts here
    phone                       <=== Views used on phones
        views/                  <=== Views directory
            home.html.twig
    tablet                      <=== Views used on tablets
        views/                  <=== Views directory
            home.html.twig
    views/                      <=== Default templates directory
        home.html.twig
    translations/               <=== Translations directory
        messages.en.xlf
        messages.de.xlf
    screenshots/                <=== Theme screenshots
        front.jpg
    public/                     <=== Assets directory
        css/
        js/
        images/
    theme.json                  <=== Theme configuration

Note

If a device is not recognized by the Publisher, it will fall back to the desktop type. If there is no desktop directory with the required template file, the locator will try to load the template from the root level views directory.

More details about theme structure and configuration can be found in the Sylius Theme Bundle documentation.