Creating Concrete5 Themes

Create high quality concrete5 themes using practical recipes and responsive techniques to make it mobile-ready

Overview

• Get to grips with the concrete5 architecture.
• Learn how to create a concrete5 theme.
• Discover how to make a theme responsive to improve it for small devices.

In Detail

Creating a concrete5 theme isn’t complicated if there’s already a HTML document. There are only very few PHP functions you’ll have to add, but those are powerful and give you a lot of freedom. As you’ll learn to create mobile ready themes, you’ll start to see that there’s almost no limit in what you can do.

“Creating Concrete5 Themes” is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with a number of examples that will teach you how to create powerful concrete5 themes, change the look of content block elements, and even make your site ready for mobile devices.

“Creating Concrete5 Themes” starts with a few words about the editing concept and architecture of concrete5 and then continues with the creation of a basic theme which gets extended with more and more elements until the theme is mobile ready.

You will learn where to find the information necessary to get your own concrete5 site and then get a quick introduction to understand the idea of the in-site editing concept. We’ll then create a theme which is extended with features and more details as we progress. You’ll also see some examples to show you the process of overriding elements from the core without losing the ability to upgrade concrete5 in the future. Once we’ve customized every element in concrete5 to build a complete theme, we’ll have a look at responsive techniques to make your site ready for small screen devices such as mobile phones and tablets.

What you will learn from this book

• Learn how to create a concrete5 theme.
• Understand what it means to create a responsive site.
• Use multiple image sources to display high quality pictures on retina displays.
• Override core elements like the login and 404 page without losing the ability to upgrade concrete5.
• Change the look of concrete5 blocks to make them match with the rest of the site.
• Learn how to embed dynamic elements in the theme template to avoid accidental modifications.
• Change the behavior of the content to make its content visible in a modal dialog box.
• Create a background picture that scales with the size of the browser window and can be changed in the user interface.

Approach

Practical guide to create Concrete5 themes

Who this book is written for

This book is great for theme developers new to concrete5 who are looking to use their experience in HTML and CSS to create high quality themes for concrete5. It’s assumed that you have worked with HTML before and can also read code as you’ll see some basic PHP and JavaScript code. There are a few words about using concrete5, but you’re expected to spend a bit of time on your own to get familiar with the concrete5 interface by yourself and by reading some of the articles listed in the book. Readers are expected to have the ability to set up their own concrete5 site, but basic information about the installation and links to follow up are provided though.