Customising/Themes

A Mahara theme is a set of Smarty templates, css stylesheets, images, and a very simple configuration file.  Each theme is installed in a subdirectory under htdocs/theme, but because of Mahara's plugin architecture, some template files for a theme may also be found inside plugin directories rather than under htdocs/theme.

Mahara themes support inheritance from "parent" themes.  If a theme specifies a parent, then it only needs to override things that are not defined by the parent theme. This means that you can often create a theme just by writing a new CSS file, and maybe overriding some images. Copying all of the templates is not required.

Mahara 20.10+ theming guide

Historical

These pages are for long-obsolete Mahara versions, and are kept around for historical reasons only.

• Mahara 19.04-20.04 theming guide
• Mahara 17.04-18.10 theming guide
• Mahara 15.10-16.10 theming guide
• Mahara 1.10-15.04 theming guide
• Mahara 1.8 Theming guide (Somewhat applicable up to 15.04)
• Mahara 1.8 Icons guide (Somewhat applicable up to 15.04)
• Mahara Themes - 1.2 to 1.9 (Obsolete)
• Mahara 1.1 Themes (Obsolete)
• Migrating themes from 1.1 to 1.2 (Obsolete)
• Mahara 1.3 Themes for Institutions (Obsolete)
• Differences between Smarty and Dwoo (Obsolete)