Theming MediaGoblin¶

We try to provide a nice theme for MediaGoblin by default, but of course, you might want something different! Maybe you want something more light and colorful, or maybe you want something specifically tailored to your organization. Have no fear—MediaGoblin has theming support! This guide should walk you through installing and making themes.

Installing a theme¶

Installing the archive¶

Say you have a theme archive such as goblincities.tar.gz and you want to install this theme! Don’t worry, it’s fairly painless.

cd ./user_dev/themes/
Move the theme archive into this directory
tar -xzvf <tar-archive>
Open your configuration file (probably named mediagoblin_local.ini) and set the theme name:
```
[mediagoblin]
# ...
theme = goblincities
```
Link the assets so that they can be served by your web server:
```
$ ./bin/gmg assetlink
```

Note

If you ever change the current theme in your config file, you should re-run the above command!

(In the near future this should be even easier ;))

Set up your webserver to serve theme assets¶

If you followed the nginx setup example in FastCGI and nginx you should already have theme asset setup. However, if you set up your server config with an older version of mediagoblin and the mediagoblin docs, it’s possible you don’t have the “theme static files” alias, so double check to make sure that section is there if you are having problems.

If you are simply using this for local development and serving the whole thing via paste/lazyserver, assuming you don’t have a paste_local.ini, the asset serving should be done for you.

Configuring where things go¶

By default, MediaGoblin’s install directory for themes is ./user_dev/themes/ (relative to the MediaGoblin checkout or base config file.) However, you can change this location easily with the theme_install_dir setting in the [mediagoblin] section.

For example:

[mediagoblin]
# ... other parameters go here ...
theme_install_dir = /path/to/themes/

Other variables you may consider setting:

theme_web_path: When theme-specific assets are specified, this is where MediaGoblin will set the urls. By default this is "/theme_static/" so in the case that your theme was trying to access its file "images/shiny_button.png" MediaGoblin would link to /theme_static/images/shiny_button.png.
theme_linked_assets_dir: Your web server needs to serve the theme files out of some directory, and MediaGoblin will symlink the current theme’s assets here. See the “Link the assets” step in Installing the archive.

Making a theme¶

Okay, so a theme layout is pretty simple. Let’s assume we’re making a theme for an instance about hedgehogs! We’ll call this the “hedgehogified” theme.

Change to where your theme_install_dir is set to (by default, ./user_dev/themes/ … make those directories or otherwise adjust if necessary):

hedgehogified/
|- theme.cfg                # configuration file for this theme
|- templates/               # override templates
|  '- mediagoblin/
|     |- base.html          # overriding mediagoblin/base.html
|     '- root.html          # overriding mediagoblin/root.html
'- assets/
|  '- images/
|  |  |- im_a_hedgehog.png  # hedgehog-containing image used by theme
|  |  '- custom_logo.png    # your theme's custom logo
|  '- css/
|     '- hedgehog.css       # your site's hedgehog-specific css
|- README.txt               # Optionally, a readme file (not required)
|- AGPLv3.txt               # AGPL license file for your theme. (good practice)
'- CC0_1.0.txt              # CC0 1.0 legalcode for the assets [if appropriate!]

The top level directory of your theme should be the symbolic name for your theme. This is the name that users will use to refer to activate your theme.

Note

It’s important to note that templates based on MediaGoblin’s code should be released as AGPLv3 (or later), like MediaGoblin’s code itself. However, all the rest of your assets are up to you. In this case, we are waiving our copyright for images and CSS into the public domain via CC0 (as MediaGoblin does) but do what’s appropriate to you.

The config file¶

The config file is not presently strictly required, though it is nice to have. Only a few things need to go in here:

[theme]
name = Hedgehog-ification
description = For hedgehog lovers ONLY
licensing = AGPLv3 or later templates; assets (images/css) waived under CC0 1.0

The name and description fields here are to give users an idea of what your theme is about. For the moment, we don’t have any listing directories or admin interface, so this probably isn’t useful, but feel free to set it in anticipation of a more glorious future.

Licensing field is likewise a textual description of the stuff here; it’s recommended that you preserve the “AGPLv3 or later templates” and specify whatever is appropriate to your assets.

Templates¶

Your template directory is where you can put any override and custom templates for MediaGoblin.

These follow the general MediaGoblin theming layout, which means that the MediaGoblin core templates are all kept under the ./mediagoblin/ prefix directory.

You can copy files right out of MediaGoblin core and modify them in this matter if you wish.

To fit with best licensing form, you should either preserve the MediaGoblin copyright header borrowing from a MediaGoblin template, or you may include one like the following:

{#
# [YOUR THEME], a MediaGoblin theme
# Copyright (C) [YEAR] [YOUR NAME]
#
# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU Affero General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
# along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
#}

Assets¶

Put any files, such as images, CSS, etc, that are specific to your theme in here.

You can reference these in your templates like so:

<img src="{{ request.staticdirect('/images/im_a_shark.png', 'theme') }}" />

This will tell MediaGoblin to reference this image from the current theme.

Licensing file(s)¶

You should include AGPLv3.txt with your theme as this is required for the assets. You can copy this from mediagoblin/licenses/.

In the above example, we also use CC0 to waive our copyrights to images and css, so we also included CC0_1.0.txt

A README.txt file¶

A README file is not strictly required, but probably a good idea. You can put whatever in here, but restating the license choice clearly is probably a good idea.

Simple theming by adding CSS¶

Many themes won’t require anything other than the ability to override some of MediaGoblin’s core css. Thankfully, doing so is easy if you combine the above steps!

In your theme, do the following (make sure you make the necessary directories and cd to your theme’s directory first):

$ cp /path/to/mediagoblin/mediagoblin/templates/mediagoblin/extra_head.html templates/mediagoblin/

Great, now open that file and add something like this at the end:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
      href="{{ request.staticdirect('/css/theme.css', 'theme') }}"/>

You can name the css file whatever you like. Now make the directory for assets/css/ and add the file assets/css/theme.css.

You can now put custom CSS files in here and any CSS you add will override default MediaGoblin CSS.

Packaging it up!¶

Packaging a theme is really easy. It’s just a matter of making an archive!

Change to the installed themes directory and run the following:

tar -cvfz yourtheme.tar.gz yourtheme

Where “yourtheme” is replaced with your theme name.

That’s it!