Theme Configurations
The Theme Configurations page allows you to set what themes are available for your institution within Design Tools.
Original Approach Deprecated
When Design Tools was originally created, themes were represented by thumbnail images to help users select a theme.
The presence of these thumbnail images within a folder of the customizations course determined what themes were available.
There were several drawbacks to this approach:
- If you update the theme colors for your institution you have to update the thumbnail if you want an accurate representation. This can take an hour or more to accomplish.
- The thumbnails are small enough they don't give a clear idea of what that theme looks like.
- All themes used the same banner image.
- Theme customization was handled quite different from the other configurations.
Customization Page Change
Cidi Labs decided to help institutions by customizing the themes as part of the installation process. The process of updating the thumbnails made this process rather time consuming which goes against the founding ideas behind Design Tools so the way themes are setup went back to the drawing board.
The solution came by listing all of the themes on a content page where the tools can parse that information.
Here is the current interface:
This new method has the following advantages:
- Theme names and button colors can be customized.
- An unlimited number of variations can be created by adding an additional class to a base theme and customizing CSS colors for that added class.
- Banner images are defined on a theme by theme basis
- Hovering over a theme gives you a preview of what that theme looks like. This preview will even pull in existing page content if that content was created using Design Tools.
- Themes can also be extended at a sub account level or through a shared Design Tools Extended Customization course.
Using the New Themes
The Theme Configurations page is part of all new Design Tools installations. For existing installations, the Theme Configurations page is available through Canvas Commons and can be added to the institutions Design Tools Primary Customizations course.
Existing customers may also want to consider changing to the Design Tools Primary Customizations course that is available through Canvas Commons to help their institution stay up to date with new features.
For help or questions regarding the new theme configurations, please file a Support Ticket with Cidi Labs Links to an external site..