Welcome to the third video of our sneak peak series! Today, we're really excited to introduce you to the new Theme Editor!

Built entirely from scratch, the new editor provides an instant, live preview of your theme, as soon as you modify a setting. It's a zero-code approach to creating themes, and has been designed to ensure your theme adheres to your color scheme and looks great on every device, with very little effort. Let's take a closer look!

 

 

To the left of the editor, you’ll see a live preview of your community. You can navigate to any page, as if you were browsing your site normally. At the top left of the editor, you’ll find icons which change the theme between the light and dark color schemes. Below that are buttons which change the viewport size, from desktop, to tablet, to mobile. This is a really convenient way to ensure your theme looks great on every device, without needing to manually resize your browser window.

Lets take a closer look at the Color Palette.

Editing colors in version 4 was a fairly time consuming process. For example, modifying the color scheme from the default blue to another color meant that 26 theme settings needed to be changed. In contrast, the Version 5 theme is powered by just 3 colors: Primary colors are responsible for styling the main elements on your page, such as the Start new topic button. Secondary colors control minor elements, such as pagination links, while the Base color is responsible for controlling the overall tint on your site.

Clicking on these colors opens a color picker. Let’s change this blue color to yellow.

 

 

You’ll notice two things have happened here. First, the preview window updated as soon as we modified the color. All elements which were previously blue, now use yellow, such as the Start new topic button. Secondly, the text color in our button has changed from white to black. This is our automatic contrast feature and it ensures our text is easy to read on our new yellow background, since white text may be more difficult to read for some viewers.

Below the color picker is a text box, with our color displayed in HSL. You can paste your own colors in this box, in any color format and that color will be applied to your elements.

 

 

The Base color controls the tint of your backgrounds and text colors. Let's try a few examples to demonstrate how easy it is to recolor your theme.

 

 

Next up are Logos! Invision Community 5 has three logo types: a text logo, an image logo for desktops and an image logo for mobiles. Let’s edit our text logo.

 

 

After changing the text to “Theme Editor Demo”, we can see that the logo in our preview window updates instantly with our new text. Below that, we have multiple options to help us style the text logo, such as font-family These fonts are a combination of system fonts and web fonts. The web fonts are hosted locally on your site for optimal performance. Additionally, we can also change the font-weight and font-size. We might want a different font-size for mobile logos, so that can be edited too. We can see a live preview by changing our viewport to the mobile option.

If you’d prefer to use an image logo, you can assign it using the Image Logo options. Image logos are made up of 2 upload fields, one for the light theme and one for the dark theme. Below these upload fields, a slider lets you resize your logo so it fits neatly.

 

 

Layout options let you assign the default layouts in your community. In our first sneak peak video, we showcased the new side panel layout, feed view for forum categories, and compact view for topics. These can all be enabled via the theme editor using a simple select menu.

 

 

Lets explore some Color options! In the Header panel, we can see a list of elements we can customize. Clicking on an element opens the Swatch List, which is a list of 22 colors that are powered by the Base, Primary and Secondary colors from earlier. We have 6 "light" base colors, 6 "dark" base colors as well as various shades of our primary and secondary colors. Clicking on any of these swatches will apply that color to your element.

But what if none of these colors suit your requirement? That’s where the Color Picker comes in handy. Here, we can easily choose any color, or even paste in our own color like before.

 

 

A major hurdle with themes in version 4 was customising the header. Depending on the complexity, this would typically involve modifications to both the CSS and HTML. That is a thing of the past with version 5! If we flick over to our Settings tab, you’ll see a brand new interface for customising the header. A new drag and drop feature allows you to easily reposition header elements without touching a single line of code.

 

It’s an incredibly fun tool to play with, and we’re really excited to hear what you think!

Below the drag and drop area, we can customise the header further by using sliders to adjust its height, or we can enable navigation icons with a single click. Body settings let you can customise global elements such as the body background color, text colors, the max-width of your site, the font-family, font-size and more.

Editing Content boxes has always required code modifications in the past. Using this new editor, we can adjust not only the colors of the boxes, but also the borders and shadows. Theme editing has honestly never been this easy!

 

And there you have it! Our brand new theme editor. With a few simple clicks and drags, we've been able to create a customised theme that looks great on desktops and mobiles, with a new color scheme, new logos, a customised header, new page layouts and restyled content boxes - all without touching a single line of code.

Speaking of code, for those of you who want to apply more advanced customisations, we’ve added a really convenient way to access your custom CSS file, via a new dialog box.

And last but not least - the new theme editor is fully responsive, so even if you’re away from the desk, so you’ll be able to change colours and settings, upload new logos, redesign your header and even add your own code!

 

 

Developing this new editor has been a lot of fun, and it’s even more fun to use. Themes have never been easier to edit and we're really excited for you all to get your hands on it so you can have a play for yourself - but for now, let us know what you think the comments, and we’ll see you next time!

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Insane! I love it!

22 minutes ago, Matt said:

We have an internal wiki that is quite basic, but we'll eventually get an improved version out to the public (this is a little out of date but you get the idea).

I see @Ehren came around to Tailwind 😉 

Every IPS client at launch of v5 immediately changing all of their color schemes just to play with the theme editor.  

Nice job with the theme editor controls.  There are so many options to customize the theme.  

I'm personally most excited about mobile views and header controls to control the placement of logos, menus, and breadcrumbs.  Menus and above the fold placement is especially important for a mobile world, and we need to be judicious with how space is allocated.  

Edited October 19, 20232 yr by Joel R

This looks really, really good. I'm so glad to see new CSS underpinning everything - about time! Automatically creating color palettes from main colors is lovely too. While we worked towards some of these changes with v4 it was always difficult without breaking the entire ecosystem. I'm happy you've managed to get a clean break.

You've really done a fantastic job, @Ehren. Congratulations! You've left no work for the designers. We're left wondering what we can improve. You've included all the features. Jokes aside, thank you for your efforts. I have a question that's been on my mind. As we know, design developers create unique templates for themselves in different themes. These templates are visible in all designs after the Designers' Mode process. I actually consider this to be an issue. Each design should have its own unique templates, and these templates should not be displayed in other designs. Is there any work or development in progress regarding this matter?

Will there be any adjustments regarding the Designers' Mode duration? For someone with many designs, this can be quite frustrating. I haven't been in the IPS field for a long time, so I might have missed some updates. I apologize for that. I'll need to review everything again.

Can't wait to get my hands on it. This is exactly what we have been waiting for in our community. 

Next generation software. At first I was skeptical about IC5 but with more and more announcements, I think it looks very good. Many improvements and facilities for people without experience in creating a theme or plugins.

Personally, I am happy with the new sidebar and clickable panels. The mobile menu is also cool, it fulfills its function because I have such a menu in my community and it makes navigation much easier.

Very good work so far, looking forward to more announcements 🤜🤛