Themes
How themes work in Basker — what they control, where their settings live, and how to manage the theme installed on your site
A theme is what your visitors see when they land on your site. It defines the layout, typography, colour, navigation, and interaction patterns — the look and feel — and it determines which content blocks are available to your editors when they build pages.
Most Basker customers run a custom theme — a theme built specifically for their organisation by a theme developer. This documentation covers what site editors and theme integrators need to know about working with a custom theme. For developer-level information about building themes, see basker.dev.
What a theme provides
A custom theme provides:
- Layouts and templates that decide how each kind of page is structured.
- Content blocks that editors compose pages from. Different themes ship with different blocks.
- Theme settings — the global controls (colours, fonts, navigation behaviour, footer content) the theme exposes for editors to configure.
- Per-page settings the theme allows individual pages to override.
- Block, page, and content rendering for everything visitors see.
What a theme doesn't control
A theme doesn't control your content. The events, pages, posts, people, and other records you create stay the same when you switch themes. The new theme decides how to display them, but the records themselves are independent.
A theme also doesn't control configuration that's part of your site rather than its appearance: domains, languages, redirects, integrations, users. Those live in Site settings and Apps & integrations.
Working with the theme installed on your site
Open Themes under Design in Basker. The screen is subtitled Manage and customize your site's appearance with themes. Upload custom themes or create no-code themes.
The Themes screen has two sections:
- Current theme — the theme powering your live site, with a status badge (Healthy, Warning, or Critical) and actions for Configure, Upload Theme, Deploy, and View Logs.
- Theme library — other themes you've uploaded but haven't published yet. Each can be Published (switching your site to it), Configured before publishing, or previewed via Copy Preview Link.
From here you can:
- View and edit theme settings using the Configure button.
- Review theme logs for validation messages, sync results, and processing details.
- See the history of theme deployments and roll back to a previous version if needed.
Switching or updating a theme
Changing themes is a substantial operation — the new theme may expose different blocks, settings, and templates from the old one. Coordinate with your theme developer before making the switch, and use a non-production deployment to preview the change first.