Using the Theme Editor

Caribou allows for quick and simple online editing of your website’s design in the Theme Editor. It can be accessed in Layout > Theme Editor in the control panel. This feature is excellent for day-to-day theme editing and also for web designers to offer their clients who may want to make small changes to the design without the source files or technical knowledge.

Administrators can use the Theme Editor to browse their website page-by-page as if they were a regular website visitor. Forms and links all work as expected. When you would like to make a change to the design of the page you are visiting, select “edit this template”. Caribou will load up the editable template where you can make instant changes to your website.

Furthermore, Caribou will link to included templates (such as the header and footer) and CSS stylesheets under “Included Files” to the right of the file editor. This is helpful because often the changes necessary to change the design are in CSS stylesheets or other template files. Caribou allows you to edit these easily.

Certain images are able to edited directly within the Theme Editor, as well. Where this is possible, a link will appear in the top bar of the Theme Editor browser that says “upload new [image name] image”. The new image must be of the same filetype as the previous image.

Note: If you are editing a template in the Theme Editor or via FTP, you can mark images for quick upload in the Theme Editor by assigning them the class “editable”.

<img src="/path/to/local/image.jpg" class="editable"
alt="this image can be replaced" />

To upload a new image for inclusion in your templates, you can select “upload an image / asset” from the right sidebar whenever you are in the File Editor.

If you experience file errors when modifying your templates, make sure that all template files and their directories are writeable by the PHP software and have the correct file permissions and owners. To do this, CHMOD all files in /templates to mode 0777 and make sure that the webserver user owns the file with the CHOWN command.