Choosing and customising a theme

A theme supplies shared layouts, navigation, header/footer and styles around your page content. Changing a theme changes presentation; your Markdown source or visual page content remains editable separately. A layout is one template within a theme, such as a normal page and a wide page.

Select a design

1. Open Themes and choose Viking Light or Viking Ink, the bundled starting points, or an installed custom theme.
2. In Preview content, inspect the standard sample site, then saved pages from your own site. Check long titles, menus, images and mobile widths.
3. Choose the default page layout and Use theme for site.
4. Save any page-specific Page layout overrides and publish when ready.

Original page styling removes the selected site theme. Selecting a theme in the workspace only previews it until you apply it. Applying/saving it changes the draft site's appearance; publication changes what visitors see.

Edit a shared template

Bundled themes are read-only. Use Save as copy to create your own custom version. Select a layout or shared header/footer in Template, then edit with the visual canvas and Styles/Properties controls. Add layout starts from the default layout. Save before switching workspaces; use the offered save/discard/cancel decision when unsaved changes are detected.

Installed static block packs also appear in the theme editor's Blocks panel. For example, add Social profile links to a shared footer or Floating back to top to a layout to show it on every page using that template. Edit the links, save the theme and publish. Removing the block pack leaves inserted template content and styles intact, and exported themes include them without requiring the pack. Page-dependent blocks such as repeated file galleries remain available in the page editor; renderer plugins provide page formats rather than template blocks.

To rename a layout, select it in Template, edit Layout name, then choose Save theme (or Save as copy for a bundled theme). The name appears in the template chooser, Site layout, and the page editor's Page layout menu. Names can contain spaces and Unicode characters. Clearing the name restores the original identifier as the menu label. Renaming keeps existing site and page layout selections intact. Shared header/footer templates do not have this layout-name field. New layouts initially copy the default layout's design; give each one a descriptive name before saving.

Bindings are placeholders whose values Viking fills during rendering: Page content, Page title, Site title, Site description, Navigation, Copyright, and shared parts such as Header/Footer. Keep exactly one Page content binding in every layout. Edit the page itself to change that content. Add a Navigation binding if the template needs the generated menu. Copyright uses the UTC year at preview/publication; an already published release keeps its rendered year until republished. Preview shows actual values where the editing canvas shows labelled placeholders.

The shared stylesheet controls site-wide colours, typography and spacing. CSS is a language for appearance, and is optional for ordinary editing. Theme CSS follows page CSS. A missing layout error means a page refers to a layout the selected theme does not provide; choose a compatible layout before applying.

Images, bundles and deletion

Use Shared stylesheet and bundled assets to add theme-owned raster images or WOFF/WOFF2 fonts, up to 2 MiB each. These travel with a theme bundle; do not use a particular site's media IDs for a reusable theme. Theme assets have separate limits from the ordinary media library.

To add a header image, select Shared part: header in Template, then add the file under Shared stylesheet and bundled assets. An image is inserted into that template. Move and style it on the canvas, then save the theme. You can also double-click an image on the theme canvas and upload or select an image in its image picker. Both upload controls bundle images into the current theme; the picker lists that theme's images, separately from page media. Fonts are added through Shared stylesheet and bundled assets, and referenced in the shared stylesheet as viking-asset:filename.woff2.

Use filenames containing only letters, numbers, hyphens or underscores, with a supported extension: .png, .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .webp, .avif, .woff or .woff2. Each filename must be unique within the theme. Save the theme to persist the uploaded bytes; publish to update the live header. If an older editor has already inserted a site-media image and saving reports “themes must bundle assets instead of referencing site media”, replace that image using the bundled-assets control above. Check other layouts and shared parts for the same image reference if the error persists.

Download theme bundle exports the saved design as a .viking-theme.zip. Import theme bundle installs a new theme without overwriting an existing identifier. Preview it, apply it and publish separately. A bundle is not a site backup: it does not contain your site's draft pages or all uploaded files.

Delete theme removes an unused custom theme. First apply another theme if it is active. Bundled and active themes cannot be deleted. Confirming deletion also discards unsaved changes in that theme workspace. Retained public releases keep their old design and asset bytes.

See the theme reference for layouts, bindings and portable designs.