Themes and customisation

How easy is it to change the look and layout of your site?

The Ghost admin panel enables you to make broad changes to the colour scheme by choosing elements like the highlight colour. Beyond that, it has a well-stocked theme browser, and this combination adds up to something that’s easy enough for end-users to dabble with.

As ever, WordPress has a great deal of choice when it comes to themes, and they can be browsed, previewed and installed from within the admin interface. It’s marked as beta at the moment, but there’s a built-in GUI theme editor in which you can hover over an element and edit it using a pop-up toolbar.

There are excellent collections of Joomla! and Drupal themes available online, even beyond their official sites. Joomla! enables you to have more than one theme simultaneously, associating different themes with different content, but installation is done manually. This involves downloading the theme and installing via FTP or file access on the server

Drupal comes with some bundled themes that are selectable in the admin interface, but again, installation of extra themes must be done manually. However, you can edit the currently installed themes in terms of things like the colour scheme and banner logo. We loved the Structure menu that makes it possible for straightforward changes to be made to the layout of the site elements such as sidebars and headers. WordPress’s facilities for this task are drag and drop and potentially fiddly.

ProcessWire uses a template system that controls colour theme and layout and can be associated with given pages. It’s potentially a flexible system for web-coding experts, but there’s no easily browsable collection of installable themes.