Theme Development

Theme customisation is done by creating files in themes/<theme name>.

The general idea with Shimmie theming is that each Extension will add a set of Blocks to the Page, then the Page is in charge of deciding how they should be laid out, what they should look like, etc.

The overall layout is controlled by page.class.php, where the body_html() function will take a look at all of the separate Blocks and turn them into the final rendered HTML.

Individual Extensions will render their content by calling functions in ext/<extension name>/theme.php - for example the code in ext/comment/main.php will display a list of comments by calling display_comment_list() from ext/comment/theme.php.

If a theme wants to customise how the comment list is rendered, it would do so by creating an override file in themes/<theme name>/comment.theme.php with contents like:

// themes/theme_name/comment.theme.php
class ThemeNameCommentTheme extends CommentTheme {
    public function display_comment_list(
	array $images,
	int $page_number,
	int $total_pages,
	bool $can_post
    ) {
        /* render the comment list however you like here */
    }
}