Custom Themes

Theming for pimentaCHAT is an incomplete feature and we encourage developers to contribute to this issue. We’d love to hear from anyone working on themes in the #skins-and-theming group channel.

To customize the pimentaCHAT UI you can either modify the pimentachat-theme or pimentachat-ui packages directly, but if you’re keeping in sync with active development it would be easier to avoid conflicts by creating your own theme package.

Creating a Theme

You can add theme customisations to pimentaCHAT by just creating a Meteor package with your code, then adding it to the packages file.

Private themes would need to be maintained on your own fork of pimentaCHAT, but public themes could be published as a Meteor package outside the pimentaCHAT repo.

The minimum contents for a theme package would be a package.js file containing the description, e.g:

Package.describe({
    name: 'author:mytheme',
    version: '0.0.1',
    summary: 'My theme customisations.',
    git: 'https://github.com/author/my-pimenta.chat-theme'
});

Then include dependent packages and your custom theme files. e.g:

Package.onUse(function(api) {
    api.versionsFrom('1.2');
    api.use([
        'templating',
        'pimentachat:lib',
        'pimentachat:theme'
    ]);
    api.use('templating', 'client');

Adding Stylesheets

The pimentachat-theme package has methods for including Less asset files in the build. Less files (and the a server.coffee or .js file to load them) must first be included in the package.js manifest (within the Package.onUse function), e.g.:

    api.addAssets([
        'assets/theme.less'
    ], 'server');
    api.addFiles([
        'server.coffee'
    ], 'server');

Then in server.coffee…

RocketChat.theme.addPackageAsset -> Assets.getText 'assets/theme.less'

That will read in any styles and variables from your custom less file and compile it with the rest of the css.

Adding and Modifying Templates

A suggested approach for including custom templates and helpers is to use the 'aldeed:template-extension' package (include it in your main packages file). In your package manifest, declare use of the template-extension package, then add your template files to Meteor api.addFiles([myfiles], 'client').

Here’s an example replacing the unauthorized page template:

** In package.js **

    api.addFiles(['views/notAuthorized.html', 'client.coffee'], 'client');

** In views/notAuthorized.html **

<template name="myNotAuthorized">
    <h2>My Custom Not Authorized Page</h2>
</template>

** In client.coffee **

Template.myNotAuthorized.replaces 'notAuthorized'

See the docs for that package for more info on inheriting and overwriting templates and helpers.

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