I would like to contribute a theme I created and posted on github:

https://github.com/AntPortal/ikiwiked

For an example of the theme in action, see: https://antportal.com/wiki/

Shouldn't we just make people post their themes in the themes page? Or maybe we should make a theme market? --anarcat

I did just that. -- anarcat

What is the process for merging a theme in Ikiwiki? It seems to me the Bootstrap theme could improve the options a lot... See the theme market for the links to the actual theme. -- anarcat

Step 1 is to not need two versions of page.tmpl to be maintained. This is, unfortunately, the reason why I have not pulled in the bootstrap theme yet. I recently made <TMPL_IF THEME_$NAME> be available, so the page.tmpl could use that to do different things if the boostrap theme was enabled. --Joey

Would you reconsider? I've made this bootstrap theme that works within the theme plugin without changing the templatedir configuration option. It seems that the page.tmpl I have in the subfolder templates takes precedence. Not sure what you meant by "two versions of page.tmpl", though. -- desci

The reason we don't want individual themes shipped with ikiwiki to have to include their own page.tmpl is that when we add new features (such as new plugins) to the ikiwiki core, if those features require a page.tmpl change, we don't want to have to add them to multiple variations of page.tmpl. This would either lead to increased maintenance work (repeating ourselves), or theme-dependent feature availability like what happens in Wordpress (for instance imagine if osm only worked with Bootstrap and sidebar only worked with Actiontabs - you wouldn't be able to have both).

If you maintain your own local theme, you're welcome to maintain a version of page.tmpl containing only the features you personally need, but the page.tmpl in ikiwiki should be comprehensive. --smcv

I've tried to make the least changes possible in this page.tmpl file, but I couldn't overcome the suckness of bootstrap itself. I am aware of alternatives to bootstrap, but it seems that every one of them would require some changes in the page.tmpl to work as expected. I think it is realistic to have a bootstrap (or other superb, fantastic css framelazywork) without a page.tmpl, but I also think there should be other way around the chaos of each and every available theme having it's own installing proccess. Other argument I have is: could we have a theme-contrib, like the plugins have? This would require the mantainer to implement the new features in their themes.

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I have a question.

Where should I put a custom theme other than /usr/share/ikiwiki/themes/?

I put .pm plugins on ~/.ikiwiki/Ikiwiki/Plugin and it works well.

How would I go about not tampering with the root filesystem to install a theme?

Also, I have another question:

I have a complex theme I'm working on, and it doesn't even have a style.css, because it is about editing .tmpl files and relying on the bootstrap files, so I want to know if the theme plugin will understand this structure:

/usr/share/ikiwiki/themes/
└── my-theme/
    ├── basewiki/
    │   ├── bootstrap/
    │   │   ├── css/
    │   │   │   └── bootstrap.min.css
    │   │   ├── js/
    │   │   │   ├── bootstrap.js
    │   │   │   └── bootstrap.min.js
    │   │   └── fonts/
    │   │       ├── glyphicons-halflings-regular.eot
    │   │       ├── glyphicons-halflings-regular.svg
    │   │       ├── glyphicons-halflings-regular.ttf
    │   │       ├── glyphicons-halflings-regular.woff
    │   │       └── glyphicons-halflings-regular.woff2
    │   └── index.mdwn
    └── templates/
        ├── page.tmpl
        └── whatever.tmpl

Edit: no, it doesn't. When i change theme in the config to my-theme, the engine only uses the templates subfolder under theme/my-theme, and not basewiki. So the workaround is doing like IkiStrap proposed, suggesting the user to alter the underlaydir and templatedir configs instead of choosing a theme via the old fashioned theme config.

This feels more like an overhaul than a theme for me, could we clarify what is a theme, a template, an overhaul, a change to the look and feel, a change to the frontend, a change to the design, etc.?

-- desci