FuelPHP Forums

Themes are about Views, not (directly) about assets.

In terms of evolution, the most basic is to work with individual Views, returned by controller methods. One step up is use nested views (see http://fuelphp.com/docs/general/views.html) where you have some sort of master View, and different Views for different sections of the page. Both of these solutions are static, because the hardcode a specific View to load.

With themes you separate the Views from the application by inserting a configurable theme name. This allows you to load a different set of Views by switching the theme name.

Theme also supports a fallback theme. This allows you to have a default theme for your entire application, and override parts of it by using another theme. Any view or assets not found in the configured active theme will be loaded from the fallback theme.

A theme can include assets, but assets always have to be in your public folder, because the browser must be able to fetch them. By default, APPPATH/themes is not inside your webserver docroot. For this reason, a theme can be split over two locations: one for the view files, and one for the assets.

There is also theme support for modules. This allows you to include views for a fallback theme in your module folder, which could be overridden by a central active theme.

So, to get to your questions:

The theme info file is entirely optional. It is mainly used in apps where you have end-users or app admins can install themes, like CMS type applications. In this case it could contain name of the theme, author, URL for support by the author, etc. The info file is also used as a theme config file. For example if you have a theme that comes in 5 colors, it would list these colors (for example to be used in some sort of setup program, so the user can select) and the selected color. The theme Views can then use this info in the views to load the correct css for the selected color for example. In normal apps this file is not used. It has the same definition as a config file, and supports the same types.

You can put the themes whereever you want, you define the location in the theme.php config file, in the paths array. Since this is an array, you can also define multiple paths (so for example you can separate the themes you ship an application with from user installed themes, again in a CMS type environment).

In terms of location, as said theme views can be anywhere, theme assets have to be inside the docroot. If the theme class detects that the theme you load (as either active or fallback) is outside the docroot, it will try to construct a second theme root path for your assets, inside the docroot, using the 'asset_folder' definition from the config file. By default this is 'themes', which will translate to DOCROOT.themes/<themename>/. Inside that folder you have the normal folder structure with css, img, etc. So like your tree above, but without the 'assets'.

For example, I have an app here with this config file:

return array(
    'active' => 'qualitygroup',
    'fallback' => 'default',
    'paths' => array(
        APPPATH.'..'.DS.'themes',
    ),
    'assets_folder' => 'themes',
    'view_ext' => '.php',
    'require_info_file' => false,
    'use_modules' => true,
);

In this app, APPPATH is not in the ./fuel folder, but one level up, in the installation root. The themes are also in that folder, so they are defined here as one folder up from APPPATH.

It uses module separation, so this app has

│   └───<module>
    └───<module>

(in global we have view like the page templates, 404 views, etc.) Module support means that if you have a module 'abc', and in that module you have a controller that uses themes, if you would load a view called "welcome/index", it would load the view "<themename>/abc/welcome/index" from the theme. If your module has a 'themes' folder, it would check that folder first for a view called "<themename>/welcome/index".

In it's public folder (which == DOCROOT) it has a folder called 'themes' as indicated by the 'asset_folder' key in the config. In that folder you find the folders for the themes, and in there the img, js and css folders.

sorry, had to split it in to two messages....

When you use Theme, you can't use Asset like that, the Asset class is not theme aware, so it doesn't know where to find your assets. Instead, you need to use Theme's asset extension.

Ok thanks, didn't know that. Is there a NOTE about it somerwhere in the docs ?

No, it only uses the Finder in case the requested View is not found in the configured theme folders. It's just a fallback, so you can also do a set_partial() using a standard view.

And no, it loads the views you specify from the root of the theme folder. Normally all you have in there are views, so having a 'views' folder is not really needed. But you can just name your views like that? So if you do set_partial('views/this/that'), it will load APPPATH///views/this/that.php.

ok thanks, I will try it out. 

Hello Harro, 

so instead of echo'ing $partials['widget_section']; 

Ok, this make a bit more sence for me now, but I still do not know how to output the chrome with its all partials in my base_template ? take a look at my base_template (especially Line #41)

...that would work, you can add multiple partials to a section.

Ok, I've tested it a bit and it looks like, that it only works if the view (passed to a set_partial() as a 2nd param) differs from previous one, so something like:

Instead of creating a separate asset instance and use Asset::instance(), it's better to use Theme::instance()->asset, which is an automatically created asset instance that is aware of the theme paths.

Thanks for an advice

 
I have another question about Themes Config file. I tried to use YAML cfg instead of standard PHP. So my theme config looks like:

return array(
    'active' => 'semantic_ui_theme',
    'fallback' => 'default',
    'paths' => array(     // theme files are outside the DOCROOT here
        APPPATH.'themes'.DS.'back-end'.DS,
    ),
    'assets_folder' => 'themes',  // so this implies /public/themes/...
    'view_ext' => '.php',
    'require_info_file' => false,
    'info_file_name' => 'theme_info',
    'info_file_type' => 'yaml',
    'use_modules' => true,
);

but the theme initialization fails, unless i specify the file-type in 'info_file_name'
so with 'info_file_name' => 'theme_info.yml', it will work. so what 'info_file_type' stands for ?

So this will work fine:

$theme->set_chrome('sidebar', 'chrome/rounded-corners', 'content');
$theme->set_partial('sidebar', \View::forge('test_1')->set('hello', 'world'));
$theme->set_partial('sidebar', \View::forge('test_1')->set('hello', '..not overwritten!'));

Ok, but I guess, \View::forge('test_1') in this particular case, will searching for 'test_1' in APPPATH/views/ and not in APPPATH/themes/<theme_name>/views, right ?