An Introduction to Censura's Themes
Censura allows for complete control over the look and feel of all aspects of its interfaces, both the admin control panel and the public user interface. Censura uses the Smarty Template Engine - a popular open source template engine for PHP.
Theme files include template files, css files and image files and are stored within the filesystem. In the default setup, these are within the /themes directory but this location can be changed.
Theme File Structure
Within the themes directory are sub-directories
- admin - the admin control panel theme.
- ajax - templates used by ajax widgets
- In general these should not be edited
- Ajax templates use the CSS of the theme they are called from
- api - templates for the remote web-api interface
- emails - templates for emails sent by Censura
- public - the public interface themes with subdirectories for each public theme
- rss - templates for RSS feeds generated by Censura
Public Themes
The main public interface for Censura can have an unlimited number of customisable themes. We ship a default "Censura2" theme with Censura. The public themes are stored in their own directory below the main themes/public directory and follow this structure
- css - css files used by the theme
- images - image files related to the theme with subdirectories for image usage
- includes - templates included by other templates from the same theme
- static - static templates
- user - templates for the user areas
Special Themes
The Admin Control Panel, API and RSS feeds have their own themes which can be altered. Their directory structure is similar to the public themes.
The API theme does not contain CSS and Image directories as these would be handled by the external site using the API.
JavaScript
Modern interactive websites rely on Javascript to improve the user's experience. Censura's javascript files reside in their own separate top-level directory - /js - and can be shared amongst the various themes.
Censura currently uses Prototype as its JavaScript framework, but we do plan to move to jQuery in Censura v3.