Designers - Getting Started

If you're a designer who has been tasked with creating an Apex based theme, first please ensure you have access to an Apex installation. If not and if you are familiar with docker-compose, you can use the four line installation by running the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/apexpl/apex
cd apex && mv install_example.yml install.yml
sudo docker-compose up -d
sudo docker-compose exec apex apex

That's it, and the default Apex public site will be available at http://127.0.0.1/. Throughout the documentation you will be asked to run various apex commands. You may access the Docker container's bash prompt with the command:

sudo docker-compose exec apex bash

Otherwise, you may view the Installation Guide for full installation instructions.

Create New Theme

Once you have an Apex installation to work with, create a new theme with the command:

apex package create mysite --theme

The above command will create new directories at ~/views/themes/mysite and ~/public/themes/mysite for the public assets such as images, CSS and Javascript.

Change Display Theme

You will also want to change which theme Apex is using. Open the ~/boot/site.yml file, and you will see a themes section which will look something like:

themes:
    admin: limitless
    members: orbiter
    default: default

The above signifies that the limitless theme will be used for all requests sent to the /admin/ URI, the orbiter theme will be used for all requests sent to the /members/ URI, and all other requests will use the default theme.

Assuming you're designing a public site, change the default entry in the above to:

themes:
    admin: limitless
    members: orbiter
    default: mysite

That's it, and all requests sent to the public web site will now utilize the mysite theme.