Custom themes

A few weeks ago I teased support for custom themes. You can now get started with creating your own. This is perfect for the more advanced users that want ultimate control of themes and the way they work.

This is still very early preview, but I can't keep building this on my own — so if you're keen, you can get started by heading to your blog settings page, and then Appearance. Here you'll get a link to the custom themes.

It's super easy to get started and we provide a starter kit with minimal styling to set the tone. If you're experimenting on your own blog, you're also able to pull down an example theme with your recent posts included so you can see it in place as you work on it.

Custom themes are designed to be developed locally on your machine with a minimal toolkit. Out the box you'll get a simple Ruby script to get up and running. You're welcome to use your own, or come up with your own.

After previewing your theme locally, you can then zip it up and upload it on the Custom Themes section — you'll get a chance to preview it with your live site before activating it.

If you need to make changes, you can always upload a new version — Scribbles will automatically create a new version. Once again all you need to do is preview it and then activate it. At any time you can always go back to a previous version of your custom theme or use a built in theme.

For a live example, I have used a custom theme for my own blog, which you can find here. It's basic, but follows more the design language of my main site.

The custom themes use the excellent Liquid syntax that is easy to use and read as a human (and, I guess, machine), which was developed by the folks at Shopify. There is nothing complicated about it and I love it a lot.

The starter template is everything you need to get started with a nice README with some basics and commands to get up and running in no time.

Additionally, you can take a look at the documentation for themes here. It includes all the variables you can use.

This is my first take on custom themes and I'd love some feedback. I'm working on it at a slow pace, so there is room to make changes.

Can't wait to see what you build with this.

The longterm plan is to also allow for a directory for themes at some stage — for now it's easy enough to share zip files though.

✌️❤️

— Vincent