Themes

Form Tools 2 pages are all generated through themes. Themes are simply a set of CSS, JavaScript files, images and Smarty templates. Smarty templates are just HTML, with special logical rules and placeholders that provide more control to the theme developer.

Form Tools allows you to install multiple themes and have different accounts associated with each theme; e.g. you could have 5 people logged in at the same time, viewing the same content but through very different themes. This can be beneficial in a number of ways:

• The UIs of some themes may be more intuitive and attractive that others to different users. Because of this, it's often a good idea to let client accounts have permissions to choose their own theme (this can be set for all future accounts on the Settings » Accounts tab).
• Some themes may have browser requirements that don't fit all users (e.g. a modern browser or large screen dimensions
• If your installation is being used to store forms for different websites, themes let you "brand" the UI for each user - they could see a theme that looks like their own website, for example.

Theme Versions

Form Tools is in a perpetual state of revision and development. Because of this, the webpages used to render the HTML are always in flux. So how can you be sure that a theme supports a particular version? Well, first of all, themes themselves have versions. Each version is associated with one or more Form Tools Core versions. This lets you know whether a theme is compatible with your installation or not. Secondly, to promote compatibility and reduce the amount of work needed from theme developers, the themes themselves were designed with a simple fallback mechanism. Theme developers don't need to creates pages for every page in the UI: just a handful of main global files. So, even if a theme was developed long before a version of the Core, chances are it's still compatible. Also, the upgrade script keeps track of dependencies and will always warn you if a new version of the Core code is incompatible with a theme.

The default theme

The default theme is special: it's always bundled with Form Tools and is always up to date; it contains all the pages required to properly display all pages in the interface. You should never delete the default theme. Deleting the default theme will prevent the script from working properly.

The screenshot at the top of the page is of the Settings » Themes page, rendered using the default theme.

As of Form Tools 2.1.3, the default theme includes 10 separate swatches, which let you display the default theme in a variety of different colours.