How to change the appearance of Tiki

This is a tutorial that explains how to accomplish common tasks in customizing the look and feel of your site.

Related pages:

• Themes - introduction to using themes
• Customizing Themes - how to create new or alter existing themes.

Choose an existing theme that you find attractive

If you do not like the default visual appearance of Tiki, you can easily change it by selecting from the list of bundled themes. Tiki comes with a number of themes, or "skins," which can be easily switched for some or all pages in your site (or some or all users or Groups). For how to change a currently installed theme or install one from the theme gallery, see Themes.

Increase the font size

Many people find that the fonts in many of the themes are too small. Of course, we tecchies know that you can increase the font size on any web site by doing Ctrl-Shift-+ in most browsers. But users of your site may not all be techies and may not know that trick. So you might still want to have Tiki use a larger font for your site.

As it turns out, you can't do that without creating your own theme You can use Custom CSS. Actually, you don't need to create your own theme so much as you need to customize a theme to increase the font sizes. You do this as follows.

These instructions are if you don't want to use Custom CSS

1. First, choose a bundled theme or install one from the theme gallery. Let's say you have chosen the theme called bluegreen.
2. Using FTP go to your wiki site root directory and download the bluegreen.css file and bluegreen directory to your local hard drive. Copy those under bluegreen_largefonts.css and bluegreen_largefonts.
3. Choose a scaling factor by which you want to increase fonts. Say, you want them to be 20% larger.
4. Edit the bluegreen_largefonts.css (which specifies text in pixels), and everywhere you see a statement like this:
   font-size: 10px;
5. Increase the size by the chosen factor. For example, in this case, you would write:
   font-size: 12px;
6. Save the CSS file, upload it back to the wiki site root directory, then refresh the pages. (For newer themes that specify fonts in percent and ems, generally all text can be increased proportionally by increasing the base font size, usually a body tag property.)

Apply your organization's visual branding to the site

If you use Tiki in an organization, chances are that this organization has a particular visual branding (logo, color scheme, etc...). You probably want your Tiki site to reflect that branding. This turns out to be fairly complicated, and typically involves creating your own theme, and changing the template files.

By creating your own theme, you can specify the color scheme for the various UI elements on the site so that it matches your organization's color scheme. By changing the template files you can emulate the typical layout of your organization's sites.

See Also

Shadow Layers