We have been working to bring you the first default theme for Coaster CMS which includes all of the features, we believe make Coaster great. At the same time, we have been working hard to add and update the theme export/import features so that you can export your own creations. Eventually, we will have a “sister” site to coastercms.org on which you will be able to buy/upload themes for Coaster CMS for anyone to use so if you’re a designer/developer with some great ideas of how to use the features in Coaster CMS then jump in and start creating.
The Default Coaster CMS Theme
The first Coaster CMS theme has all of the features to help inspire you to create and give you ideas of how as developers or designers you can use Coaster CMS to create brilliant websites for clients or themes for others to enjoy and use. The theme is based on Bootstrap (v3), the home page includes many features and design elements that are often seen in current design trends.
As you can see there are clear calls to actions, the theme also uses the font-awesome glyphicons and when installed, where the icons are used – the whole list of glyphicons will be available to you to choose the most appropriate ones for your CTAs. This is also a good example of the theme using Coaster CMS’ category view feature to display a list of pages in a format including icon field, title, and intro description. The 3 banners above are an example of a simple image repeater giving you the ability to add and order these banners from the admin.
This image shows the bottom of the footer of the website. The “features” section uses a repeater consisting of a select (to choose the icon), a string field and a plain text field.
The other pages in the theme are designed to show off these features and some others to give you an example of how to use and build beautiful websites.
Updating
If you are using composer to use Coaster then you will need to update the public/js folder with the latest version as this contains some updates to the file manager. Otherwise, as usual, run composer update in your project or go to Admin >> Site Settings >> Site Health >> Upgrade to update and the default theme (called coaster2016) will be available from Themes >> Manage Themes manage. If this doesn’t work then download the theme -here coaster2016. Once uploaded you can install and then activate (with or without the default page data).