Styling & Theme development

[1337Hero]

So, pardon my ignorance. I came over from the "platform that shall not be named" and it's been years since I dug around in a framework like this.

Just wanting to know, if all of the templating is just handled in the backend through the Appearance section?

I noticed under templates that not only HTML blocks are in there, but so are a bunch of .less files. And.... the best .less matches I could locate in the directory structure appear to be cache output...

As a fullstack developer, I'm a little troubled by the idea of not being able to use any dev tools for rapid builds, yeah... Actually, this seems like a horrid way to handle theming and templating for advanced developers.

And is this thing compiling LESS server side? And if that is the case, is it just when someone hits the save and exit?

Is that it? Am I stuck doing it all appearance and layout customization through the backend?

The whole styles folder, doesn't seem to contain anything that would look like a theme structure...

 

[Chris D]

It’s best to start with the developer documentation to get an overview of how development works in XF.

There’s a section on designing styles which is here:

https://xenforo.com/xf2-docs/dev/

 

[1337Hero]

Yeah, I started digging through that after posting. Looks like I'm learning a new workflow. The whole CLI into style mode is interesting. I'm really really impressed with the optimization that went into this.