Creating a theme

Roadiz themes are one of the main parts of the CMS. They allow you to create your really personal website. You can duplicate an existing theme to customize stylesheets and images. Or you can start from ground and build your very own theme using our API. Every visible part of Roadiz is a theme. Even backoffice interface is a theme, and it’s called Rozier according to the street name where REZO ZERO created it.

Each theme is a folder which must be placed in themes/ folder. Roadiz Sources comes with 3 default themes :

  • Install : It’s the first page theme you see when you launch Roadiz in your browser for the first time.
  • Rozier : Here is the REZO ZERO designed backoffice for Roadiz, it’s available from rz-admin/ url and protected by firewall.
  • DefaultTheme : It’s a demo theme which is mainly used to demonstrate basic Roadiz features and to try the back-office editing capabilities.

As these 3 themes come bundled with Roadiz, you can’t edit or update their files. Your changes would be overrode the next time you update Roadiz via Git or direct download. If you want to create your own Backoffice, you can. Just name it differently and hook it in backoffice or using CLI commands.

Source Edition

If you are using Roadiz Source edition, we configured Git versioning tool to ignore every additional theme you create in /themes folder. So you can initialize your a new git repository per custom theme you create. That way you can use code versioning independently from Roadiz updates.

Preparing your own frontend theme

To start from a fresh and clean foundation, we built a BaseTheme to fit our needs with many starter node-types and a front-end framework using ES6 and Webpack.

# Use Roadiz command to pull and rename BaseTheme after your own project
bin/roadiz themes:generate --relative --symlink MyAwesome

Your theme will be generated as /themes/MyAwesomeTheme with /themes/MyAwesomeTheme/MyAwesomeThemeApp.php class.

Standard Edition

Roadiz Standard edition will create a symbolic link into web/ folder to publish your new theme public assets as /web/themes/MyAwesomeTheme/static. Make sure that your system supports symbolic links.

Edit your main class informations (MyAwesomeThemeApp.php)

/*
 * Copyright REZO ZERO 2016
 *
 * Description
 *
 * @file MyAwesomeThemeApp.php
 * @copyright REZO ZERO 2014
 * @author Ambroise Maupate
 */
namespace Themes\MyAwesomeTheme;

use RZ\Roadiz\CMS\Controllers\FrontendController;
use RZ\Roadiz\Core\Entities\Node;
use RZ\Roadiz\Core\Entities\Translation;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;

/**
 * MyAwesomeThemeApp class
 */
class MyAwesomeThemeApp extends FrontendController
{

    protected static $themeName =      'My awesome theme';
    protected static $themeAuthor =    'Ambroise Maupate';
    protected static $themeCopyright = 'REZO ZERO';
    protected static $themeDir =       'MyAwesomeTheme';
    protected static $backendTheme =    false;

    //…
}

Then you will be able to add your fresh new theme into Roadiz backoffice or through Roadiz install.

Static routing

Before searching for a node’s Url (Dynamic routing), Roadiz will parse your theme route.yml to find static controllers and actions to execute. Static actions just have to comply with the Request / Response scheme. It is advised to add $_locale and $_route optional arguments to better handle multilingual pages.

foo:
    path: /foo
    defaults:
        _controller: Themes\MyAwesomeTheme\Controllers\FooBarController::fooAction
bar:
    path: /{_locale}/bar
    defaults:
        _controller: Themes\MyAwesomeTheme\Controllers\FooBarController::barAction
    requirements:
        # Use every 2 letter codes
        _locale: "[a-z]{2}"
public function fooAction(Request $request)
{
    $translation = $this->bindLocaleFromRoute($request, 'en');
    $this->prepareThemeAssignation(null, $translation);

    return $this->render('foo.html.twig', $this->assignation);
}

public function barAction(
    Request $request,
    $_locale = null,
    $_route = null
) {
    $translation = $this->bindLocaleFromRoute($request, $_locale);
    $this->prepareThemeAssignation(null, $translation);

    return $this->render('bar.html.twig', $this->assignation);
}

Dynamic routing

Note

Every node-types will be handled by a specific Controller. If your created a “Page” type, Roadiz will search for a …\Controllers\PageController class and it will try to execute the indexAction method.

An indexAction method must comply with the following signature. It will take the HttpFoundation’s Request as first then a Node and a Translation instances. These two last arguments will be useful to generate your page information and to render your current node.

/**
 * Default action for any Page node.
 *
 * @param Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request $request
 * @param RZ\Roadiz\Core\Entities\Node              $node
 * @param RZ\Roadiz\Core\Entities\Translation       $translation
 *
 * @return Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response
 */
public function indexAction(
    Request $request,
    Node $node = null,
    Translation $translation = null
) {
    $this->prepareThemeAssignation($node, $translation);

    return $this->render(
        'types/page.html.twig',  // Twig template path
        $this->assignation       // Assignation array to fill template placeholders
    );
}

As Symfony controllers do, every Roadiz controllers actions have to return a valid Response object. This is the render method purpose which will generate a standard html response using a Twig template and an assignation array.

Note

It’s very easy to create JSON responses for your API with Roadiz. You just have to replace $this->render($template, $assignation); method with $this->renderJson($data);. This method is a shortcut for new JsonResponse($data);.

Home page case

Homepage is always a special page to handle. With Roadiz you have the choice to handle it as a static page or as a dynamic page. In both case you’ll need to setup a static route in your theme Resources/routes.yml file.

homePage:
    path: /
    defaults:
        _controller: Themes\MyAwesomeTheme\MyAwesomeThemeApp::homeAction
homePageLocale:
    path: /{_locale}
    defaults:
        _controller: Themes\MyAwesomeTheme\MyAwesomeThemeApp::homeAction
    requirements:
        # Use every 2 letter codes
        _locale: "[a-z]{2}"

Now you can code your homeAction method in MyAwesomeThemeApp class. It will need 2 arguments:

  • A Request object: $request
  • An optional locale string variable $_locale = null

Dynamic home

If your home page is built with a node. You can tell Roadiz to handle home request as a Page request (if your home is a page type node) using $this->handle($request); method. This method will use the PageController class and page.html.twig template to render your home. This can be useful when you need to switch your home page to an other page, there is no need to make special ajustments.

/**
 * {@inheritdoc}
 */
public function homeAction(
    Request $request,
    $_locale = null
) {
    /*
     * Get language from static route
     */
    $translation = $this->bindLocaleFromRoute($request, $_locale);
    $home = $this->getHome($translation);

    /*
     * Render Homepage according to its node-type controller
     */
    return $this->handle($request, $home, $translation);
}

Static home

Imagine now that your home page has a totally different look than other pages. Instead of letting handle() method returning your Response object, you can create it directly and use a dedicated home.html.twig template. The fourth argument static::getThemeDir() is optional, it explicits the namespace to look into. It becames useful when you mix several themes with the same templates names.

/**
 * {@inheritdoc}
 */
public function homeAction(
    Request $request,
    $_locale = null
) {
    /*
     * Get language from static route
     */
    $translation = $this->bindLocaleFromRoute($request, $_locale);
    $home = $this->getHome($translation);

    /*
     * Render Homepage manually
     */
    $this->prepareThemeAssignation($home, $translation);

    return $this->render('home.html.twig', $this->assignation);
}

Keep in ming that prepareThemeAssignation method will assign for you some useful variables no matter you choice a dynamic or a static home handling:

  • node
  • nodeSource
  • translation