ThemesHowTo.md

HowTo: Create Themes

Note: You should read the Module Reference and the Template Reference before.

We assume you want to call your new theme mytheme. Make sure you replace this by your module name everytime this is mentionend in this Howto.

Creating the structure

At first create a new theme directory themes/mytheme.

Create a Makefile inside your theme directory with the following content:

include ../../build/config.mk
include ../../build/module.mk

Create the following directory structure inside your theme directory.

• ipkg
• htdocs
  • luci-static
  • mytheme
• luasrc
  • view
  • themes
  • mytheme
• root
  • etc
  • uci-defaults

Designing

Create two LuCI HTML-Templates named header.htm'' and ''footer.htm'' under *luasrc/view/themes/''mytheme*. The header.htm'' will be included at the beginning of each rendered page and the ''footer.htm at the end. So your header.htm'' will probably contain a DOCTYPE description, headers, the menu and layout of the page and the ''footer.htm will close all remaining open tags and may add a footer bar but hey that's your choice you are the designer ;-).

Just make sure your header.htm begins with the following lines:

<%
require("luci.http").prepare_content("text/html")
-%>

This makes sure your content will be sent to the client with the right content type. Of course you can adapt text/html to your needs.

Put any stylesheets, Javascripts, images, ... into htdocs/luci-static/mytheme. You should refer to this directory in your header and footer templates as: <%=media%>''. That means for a stylesheet *htdocs/luci-static/''mytheme/cascade.css* you would write:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<%=media%>/cascade.css" />

Making the theme selectable

If you are done with your work there are two last steps to do. To make your theme OpenWRT-capable and selectable on the settings page you should now create a file root/etc/uci-defaults/luci-theme-mytheme with the following contents:

#!/bin/sh
uci batch <<-EOF
        set luci.themes.MyTheme=/luci-static/mytheme
        commit luci
EOF

and another file ipkg/postinst with the following content:

#!/bin/sh
[ -n "${IPKG_INSTROOT}" ] || {
        ( . /etc/uci-defaults/luci-theme-mytheme ) &&        rm -f /etc/uci-defaults/luci-theme-mytheme
}

This is some OpenWRT magic to correctly register the template with LuCI when it gets installed.

That's all. Now send your theme to the LuCI developers to get it into the development repository - if you like.