Themes functionality has been a part of the Ushahidi Platform for a while now. It’s an important feature because it enables you easily customize the visual aspect of your deployment. To make an analogy, if your body was the Ushahidi Platform, Themes would be your clothes.

Themes are like clothes for your body.

Let’s continue on with this analogy… As the platform is right now, we have a wardrobe in place, but no clothing in it for people to put on! Why is this?

Reason 1: Lack of Documentation

We don’t have any theme documentation online at the moment. There really is no excuse for this.
Solution: With this blogpost, we’re making two themes docs available:

• Themes Overview
• How To Develop A Theme

Reason 2: Lack of Working Examples

As of now, there is only one theme that is readily available for the platform. And even then, it’s very simplistic and doesn’t really demonstrate the possibilities.
Solution: Starting in September, we will release one theme a week so that we can provide a default set of working examples that demonstrate the capabilities of themes. What this space for more info on that!

Reason 3: Lack of Awareness

We added themes functionality to the platform back in November of last year. Since then, we haven’t really talked much about it nor have we done anything to promote it.
Solution: We’re talking about it in this blog post! Also, In addition to releasing a theme a week in September, we also plan to run a “Theme Competition” with real rewards for the contestants. More information on that will be forth coming.

To sum up, themes functionality is powerful and we are working to do more to promote it while enabling the community to take advantage of it!