About Themes
Themes are what course creators use to build and style their Thinkific Site Builder pages. When beginning on Thinkific, users can select from a variety of default Thinkific themes to help them get started. These can also be customized using the HTML/CSS and a templating language called Liquid. If you're familiar with HTML/CSS, you should find Liquid fairly easy to use. In addition to the default themes that come with Thinkific, users are also able to import custom themes built by others. To get you started, here is some documentation to get familiar with Liquid:
- Liquid for Designers.
- Thinkific's Liquid variable documentation (Themes 2.0 and higher)
Included below are some basic instructions and best practice guidelines for customizing themes. Please note there are differences between Themes 2.0 and higher, so find the appropriate details depending on your versions.
Note: Editing Site Builder theme code requires the Pro/Start plan or above.
How to access a site's themes
Click on Design Your Site within your admin dashboard, and then click on Theme Library (or Themes if you aren't on Site Builder yet). This is what the Themes Library page of your admin dashboard will look like by default. You will see your current theme, and below you'll see all your inactive themes which will include any you had previously installed.
You can click on the highlighted buttons below to select Edit Code on any published or inactive theme. This will bring you into the HTML/CSS editor where you can make all your changes.
Once you are in the theme editor, you can make changes to the templates or add your own custom CSS. Remember that you will need to press File -> Save within the editor in order to see your changes take place.
Note: If you update your theme you will lose your customizations, so we recommend you keep your own changelog of the files you've edited so that you can manually add them back in if you wish to update your theme. We also recommend you duplicate the theme before you edit it, so that way you can have your separate custom theme.
Thinkific default themes
Thinkific currently has three default Themes that customer can choose from, these are named: Vogue, Vision & Empire. Each of these have a different style and feel. When customizing a theme, you can use one of these as a base, or you may start entirely from scratch.