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This instruction describes the process of installing concrete5 themes that can be found on this website, but should work for any other themes as well.

We distribute themes in zip packages, so you will need a program to extract the files from archive. For example, you can use an open source archiver – 7-zip

Follow step-by-step instruction below:

1. Download theme from our or any other website.

2. Inside zip-archive you will find other ‘themes’ folder or a folder with theme name. You should extract and upload (if your concrete5 is hosted on remote server) the theme folder to ‘CONCRETE5/themes/’ directory, where CONCRETE5 means the root directory of your cms.

Attention: the ‘themes’ directory is empty by default. It shouldn’t confuse you. This folder is used mainly for custom themes and not for themes distributed in default concrete5 pack. There is ‘concrere/themes’ directory (this one not empty) with default concrete5 themes. You shouldn’t upload there anything unless you are going to make some changes to default theme.

Tip: most probably there would be a ‘README.txt’ file with the theme. Please check the archive for such a file, it might contain specific instructions for the theme you’re installing.

3. It’s strange, but you’re almost finished with the theme installation. Now open your dashboard and go to ‘Themes’ tab (since concrete 5.2.0 – “Themes and page types” )

If you do everything properly you will see the newly added theme in the bottom of the page. There should be an ‘Install’ button. Click it.

4. Once the theme is installed, you can choose its design for certain pages. For example, open a page, click ‘Edit this page’ and then click ‘Design’ button. You should see the theme thumbnail among available designs. If you don’t see it, the theme wasn’t installed correctly, or if there are several themes installed, you might need to scroll the selection (click the right arrow button). If you select the new design, this selection will be applied to the page.

You’ll have to select the design for each page unless you activate the theme. To activate it, you should click appropriate button in the ‘Themes’ section of the site dashboard. Note: this action will reset all previously set custom selections, i.e. all pages will be associated with the new design.

Just a reminder: Don’t forget to check ‘README.txt’ file of your theme before installing it.

When you set up a website you’ll most probably have some blocks that are repeated from page to page. There is no need to create a new block each time you add new page. It can be done through Page Types functionality of the great cms called concrete5. So, let’s say you need to have some content in the sidebar that is repeated on every page, here is what you should do to save your time:

1. Log in as admin of your concrete5 installation.
2. Open ‘Dashboard’.
3. Go to Page Types section.
4. Click on ‘Defaults’ button of the necessary page type.
5. Concrete5 will redirect you to the page where you can get into editing mode and add blocks that you want to be created on the page type pages by default.
6. You can also set default permissions the same way.
7. Once you exit editing mode and click ‘Publish changes’, default settings will be applied and every time you create a new page with that page type, it will have pre-defined set of blocks and permissions.

If you want to have a logo instead of  Site name in the header of your pages, do the following:

1. Locate the directory of your theme. For default (Plain Yogurt) theme it is /concrete/themes/default/

2. Upload your logo (for example, logo.jpg) to the images directory inside your theme directory.

3. Find the template header.php file at the directory with the theme you are using.

For example, header.php for default (Plain Yogurt) theme can be found in /concrete/themes/default/elements/

4. Open the file and find the code:

5.  REPLACE

WITH

Of course, images/logo.jpg must be the filepath for the logo you upload at step number 2.

If you want to have an external link (the link that points outside of your concrete5 cms) in navigation menu and in the sitemap structure, you can do it the following way:

1. Log in as admin.
2. Go to Dashboard.
3. Click on the page you would like to be the parent of your external link (for example, you can add external link to homepage or to `About` page), so in the sitemap structure the external link will be shown as a child of this parent.
4. In the popup menu click ‘Add External Link’.
5. Fill the URL of your link and its title (name).
6. Click ‘Add’.

The link will appear in your sitemap structure and in the Auto-Nav (automatically generated navigatio) block.