Introduction

Navigate CMS provides a powerful theme system. With this guide, everyone can learn how to create a theme and distribute it for others to use. You can even publish and sell it in our shop!

Let's start with the basics; a theme is a collection of files that define how a website must be shown. In other words, in Navigate CMS you define the website menu entries and create the contents, then the theme renders all elements in a view.

The template engine provides what we've called "nv tags"; these are special HTML tags that the application understands and translates to blocks of HTML code. For example, you can tell Navigate CMS to "place here the main website menu" this way:

<nv object="nvweb" name="menu" />

A theme can have configuration options like the color scheme you want to use for a certain website or a field to upload the logo that will be displayed on all pages. All these options are declared in the theme definition.

Multilanguage is a core feature of Navigate CMS so creating translations for a theme is extremely easy. And if the website owner wants to change a text (for example "Log in" instead of "Sign in") he will be able to do that within the Navigate CMS interface without modifying any of the theme files. That also means that if a new version of a theme is released and the website owner wants to update it, he won't have any extra work to do.

Finally, as themes can be very complex, Navigate CMS provides a way to export and import sample content. This way, someone can install the CMS, download a theme and import the sample content for that theme and he will have a working website ready to be customized in minutes!

Please check the Ocean theme included in every Navigate CMS installation package for a full example.

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