Earlier days one of the stopping points for using Weebly site was the obsolete themes offered. Later Weebly made an effort to update themes to cope up with modern site building. The ultra-responsive themes like cento, paris, aroma, etc. are wonderful options for webmasters to start building a stunning site even with the free plan. But it is not always the case, certainly most of the time, you will like all the features of a single theme. You may like the layout of one theme and some elements like button, blockquote, etc. from other theme. Or you may like the drag and drop editor but not the themes offered by Weebly. In such scenarios, modifying the default theme is required or you can develop or buy a custom theme from third party companies and use on your Weebly site.
In this article we will discuss how a webmaster can modify, import and export theme in Weebly.
Editing a Weebly Theme
Weebly allows both free and premium users to modify the theme files to add additional features. Once you logged in to your Weebly account choose the site you want to edit. Then navigate to “Design > Edit HTML/CSS” to view the theme’s core files. Each theme will basically has two sets of files:
- Header Types – here you can view different types of HTML page layouts.
- Assets – here you can view the site’s main stylesheet, images and script files.
Though you can upload different types of files under “Assets” section, all file types may not work as intended. For example, we do not see .php file works though they can be uploaded. But you can upload an image file and insert the URL wherever you want using image or embed code element.
The advantage of uploading files like stylesheets and scripts is that they can be referred anywhere centrally on the site. You also can create or modify the header types as you need.
Exporting a Weebly Theme
“Export Theme” option is available under Weebly code editor as shown in the below picture:
Weebly Theme Export Option
The exported theme will be in .zip format and extracting the .zip file will have the files as shown in the picture below:
Exported Weebly Theme Files
Basically HTML page layouts and the main CSS will be available as individual files and all other files like scripts, images and other custom uploads will be available under “assets” folder.
Exporting the theme is of really very less use in Weebly unless otherwise you want to have a local backup of your modified theme. The problem is the exported theme can’t be again imported as it is and needs change in files arrangement in appropriate structure.
Exporting theme and creating a .zip archive of your site are two different things. Theme export will only have theme files whereas the site archive will only have the content of your site.
Importing a Weebly Theme
Importing a Weebly theme is mostly needed when you buy a theme from third parties. The import option is available under “Design > Change Themes > Import Theme”.
Weebly only allows the theme import with the following conditions:
- Theme file should be a .zip archive and no other file format is accepted.
- There should be an index.html and main_style.css as part of the import, without which the import will fail.
- All files should be available in root directory and files inside subdirectories will not get uploaded. This means all files should be in a single folder as an individual files and archived in zip format without any subfolders.
Weebly Theme Import Conditions
Once the file is imported, Weebly will automatically add a custom theme with the name of the zip file. You can search and choose the theme for your site.
Since the export and import files structures are not the same, exported theme can’t be again imported without modification. This is a similar problem like the archived content can’t be uploaded back in Weebly.
Though Weebly says the subfolder content will not be uploaded, we noticed that is not the case.
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