Introduction

Plate consists of an admin dashboard where you can maintain websites and themes. A website is based on a theme. Every website uses a theme. Themes are made out of plain HTML/CSS/JS, and a templating layer: Liquid, extended with Plate specific functionality.

In Plate there are 2 types of themes. Public themes and Custom themes. Public themes are available when creating a new site, to act as a base for the new site. Custom themes on the other hand are not-reusable themes. You could use a custom theme if you are making a completely custom site, with a custom design, of which you are sure you do not want to (or are not allowed to) reuse.

If you create a theme, it will be a public theme by default. You can change it into a custom theme by linking it to a company. You can do this by selecting an existing company in the theme options in your Partner dashboard.

How to create a theme

You can create an empty theme by going to your partner dashboard, and clicking on ‘Themes’ in the sidebar menu. Next click on ‘Create New Theme’. To download the theme files after creating it, click on ‘Download Theme’. To continue working with your theme, check out Themes & Theme files.

What happens with your theme when it is picked?

When a user picks your theme, a site gets created with not only the theme files, but also the preview content and content types of your preview site. So make sure you keep your preview site just a preview site.

A couple of tips to create a preview site:

• Use Lorem Ipsum as a placeholder for text content
• Use stock images as a placeholder for images
• Make sure to not include any references to existing companies or organizations in content fields, titles, etc.
• If you are creating a theme for a specific client, still follow these tips. You never know if you can use this theme again in the future, and it’s hard to remove all references to your client afterwards.

Uploading your theme

After creating and downloading your theme (you can also download a specific site’s theme) you want to add changes to it and upload these changes. Plate’s dev team created a deployment tool to ensure this process goes with as much ease as possible. You only have to turn on the listener, and go edit your theme files. The theme tool does the rest.