Lamb comes with three built-in themes: base, 2024, and 2026.

I’m not a designer.

  • 2026 is a worklog-style theme: light, warm-tinted, deep-amber accent, mono headings on a humanist sans body. Designed for a calm, attention-respecting personal microblog. New installs use this theme by default.
  • Base is a traditional blog theme. It also acts as the fallback theme: any file an active theme does not provide is loaded from here.
  • 2024 is a more open modern theme. It’s built on top of base.

Existing sites keep whatever theme they already use; only fresh installs start on 2026.

To switch between themes, set the theme key in the site configuration at /settings:

theme = 2024

Lamb also supports user themes in the same way. Simply create your own theme directory and assign it to the theme key. It’s recommended to version control your theme as it’s own git repo. This allows you to update Lamb and your theme separately using git.

Screenshots

Default: theme-default

2024: theme-2024

2026: theme-2026

Theme documentation

  • All functions available in theme.php can be reused in the theme.
  • A theme does not need to provide every file. Lamb falls back to src/themes/base/ when a file is missing in the active theme.
  • The only file path that is always expected in the active theme is styles/styles.css, because the_styles() always loads that stylesheet from the selected theme.
  • html.php is only needed when you want to change the outer page layout.
  • feed.php is only needed when you want to change the Atom feed output.
  • Use the part($basename) function to load any other theme includes. This enables a fallback to the base theme’s files if the file does not exist in the theme. This makes the base theme a requirement for the 2024 theme.
  • CSS stylesheets must be saved in a subfolder of the theme called styles/ and are loaded using the_styles().
  • the_styles() takes no arguments and loads styles/styles.css from the active theme.
  • the_scripts() takes no arguments and loads application scripts from src/scripts/, not from the active theme directory.
  • the_scripts() always loads src/scripts/shorthand.js.
  • Logged-in users additionally get the admin scripts in src/scripts/logged_in/.

Have a look at the pre-existing themes for examples of the above.

Any suggestions to improve theming are welcomed.

This site uses Just the Docs, a documentation theme for Jekyll.