Hi support,
I am new in suitCRM could you guide me how to change theme?
Capture.jpg - in user guide it shown the theme
capture2.jpg - after installed (default) missing the tab
Please advise
Hi christinewsy,
What version of Suite are you using? 7.9.x onward has deprecated the Suite7/R themes.
Why did SuiteCRM decide to deprecate the themes? The SuiteCRM theme has great potential but continues to be buggy, consume a ton of on-screen space, and simply isn’t as efficient as the older themes.
I fully support the concept of a better theme… but before removing choice, it would be nice if the theme was rock-solid first…
Hi Dillion,
I am using 7.9.4 version. any suggestion?
I agreed with Iarsenja the current design too buggy, consume a ton of on-screen space, and simply isn’t as efficient as the older themes.
Hi larsenja,
If you would like a greater understanding of why this change was made I suggest having a read through of the discussion thread here
Thanks for the feedback :).
Hi christinewsy,
As part of the 7.9.x we had deprecated the SuiteR & Suite7 theme as part of the features list. However if you have upgraded from an older version (and have the themes intact in the these folders) you can still set the availability of the themes by editing each themes’ themedef.php file.
Look for the lines:
‘version’ => array(
‘regex_matches’ => array(’^7.[0-8][^\d]’),
),
and change it to
‘version’ => array(
‘regex_matches’ => array(’^7.[0-9][^\d]’),
),
However I will note here that we had also removed the old Email Client from 7.9.x and thus deprecated the other themes styling for the new email module so the styling and possibly the functionality will not be the same on the older themes than it would be on the SuiteP theme.
If the Email Client isn’t of use to you i.e. physically creating and sending user made emails then you can do the above but if you wish to keep older themes AND use the Email Client (the old one) then I would recommend upgrade only to 7.8.x which has LTS.
Thanks.
Thank you for sharing. It explains things in part.
And I would lift up that as this is the choice, you need to put fixing the theme at the top of the list. That dialog boxes can still be allowed to pop up completely malformed with text missing from buttons makes the entire product look and feel cheap and rickety. Yet the underlying core is incredibly robust and the U/X betrays that robustness.
Quite candidly the theme behaves like a 1.0 product which is confusing given that this is a 7+ release. I’m truly grateful to the SuiteCRM team for the work accomplished. And I want you to succeed. And I want this product to be one that outshines others. It’s with that spirit that I’m so critical of this decision.
If I had been managing this decision I would have said… look we need to deprecate the other themes but before we do we need to at least have this theme running with a bit more polish. sigh
OK, so the theme is no more. Do you have a timeline for fixing the major issues with the current theme? I’m talking about basic functionality… not the ability to further customize it.
Thanks!
-John
Hi John,
I can’t give you an exact date of when every issue for SuiteP will be resolved. However, with the massive amount of resources that was required to support all three themes, bringing it down to one has certainly made things easier. If you take a look at the latest PR’s on the GitHub you can see that there has been a focus on automated testing. This should help to reduce the amount of regression issues that have been leading to not-so-perfect releases and will allow us to focus on fixing theme issues without them suddenly appearing again in the future. If you feel that there are “major” issues with SuiteP that are blocking basic functionality, please raise it on GitHub and we can prioritise getting out a fix.
Thanks for the feedback.
Hi Christine and John,
Have you looked into the tweaks that were done to the Suite P theme to create the Suite P Compact theme.
The changes made may address some of the issues you are having?
The Suite P Compact theme is mentioned elsewhere (and is downloadable) on this section of the forum.
Paul, thank you.
I was not aware of the “compact” theme and a quick search of the “Themes” section didn’t reveal a link. Do you have one to the particular post that goes into the details?
Also, since the latest version of suiteCRM prevents the ability to select between themes, I’m assuming that the compact theme wipes out the existing theme? If so, won’t that have to be re-installed each time suiteCRM is updated?
Thanks again!
-John
John,
SuiteCRM 7.9.x only comes with one theme (SUITE P), which accommodates new email functionality added in this release.
The Compact/Suite P Improved is just a variation of Suite P, to shunt everything closer together. You are just creating a sub-folder (…/themes/SuitePImproved2) within Suite’s folder structure.
While this folder could indeed disappear when you install a future release, if you save it beforehand and then copy it into the same relative location in the new instance, you should be OK. (The only potential issue is if the developers make any future css changes, which may need to be merged).
With that being said, here is one of the posts (by jcrist) that pertains to the Suite P Compact theme. He actually modified it from Urdhva Tech’s SuiteP Improved Theme:
I then tweaked his creation further, to my liking … larger characters, lines closer together, more contrast, add a top-left logo and other cosmetic changes. Attached are a couple of screen shots, with dummy data. (It certainly won’t win any prizes and it won’t work for mobile devices, but it suits my eyes on a laptop … easier to read in bright light and it packs a lot onto every page).
If you look further down on the above link, I added my own notes on how to install this modified theme to a SuiteCRM instance. I have also attached my style.css file, which you are free to use. Just copy this into …/themes/SuitePImproved2/css, replacing the existing style.css file. (Just make a copy of the existing style.css file before you do this).
NOTES
- SuiteCRM caches many of its files, so while you are testing things out:
- Switch on Developer Mode (via Admin > System Settings)
- Clear out the system cache and your browser cache
- Do a quick rebuild (Admin > Repair > Quick Repair and Rebuild)
- Go to Admin > Themes and select the compact version of Suite P. (Ensure that the “Enabled” and “Default Theme” boxes are checked).
-
To repeat … you are not making any unrecoverable/drastic changes to your Suite CRM instance - you are merely adding a set of sub-folders. You can always flip back to the regular Suite P, btw.
-
My tweaks to the theme expect a logo (.png) file: …/themes/SuitePImproved2/images/company_logo_small.png’. (This logo file is attached. If you want to use your own graphic, just reduce it down to the approximate dimensions of the attached and use the same name. Be sure the logo file is in-place, before you do the Repair and Rebuild).
-
These changes are to layout (styling) only.
FOR PEACE OF MIND, MAKE A BACKUP COPY OF YOUR SUITE CRM INSTANCE BEFORE YOU MAKE ANY CHANGES. IT ONLY TAKES A MOMENT!
The choice to provide only a single theme moving forward was really a bad one. They should have allowed time to at least make the only one theme stable and then deprecate others slowly, which is what the norm of the industry is.
Now moving forward with SuiteP, envisioning it and the CRM to be only a DESKTOP usable software is another wrong assumption. With people moving more and more towards Tablets, mobiles and similar devices, it should have remained to be a RESPONSIVE, use from Mobile or Tablets. I know what SA thinks is that CRM should be used in offices but this is not the Case as always. You can have Sales Agents working in the field, updating client data remotely and yet the back office is aware of the progress and follows up with next steps what their hard working sales rep has done in the field. Thinking of mobility should be added into the picture as this is a part of Scalability. If you confine your software usage for desks, you leave out a huge amount of market that lies within the CRM domain.
As already enough has been said and some very hot conversations were noticed on forums and on Github, so i would invite the developers and community members to join up in helping the SuiteP theme to improve and if possible, create a thread for developing another theme for SuiteCRM.
I don’t think the intention is to have just a single theme, going forward. It is more of a time and resources issue for Sales Agility, with the major focus being on other parts of the software. The mistake was simply to have an independent designer create Suite P, without investigation into how and where SuiteCRM is deployed. (That’s why you have UI/UX people).
Regardless, as you can see, some of us have already created variations of Suite P, to suit our own needs.
When it comes to themes, in practical use I don’t think there should be a fixed selection. Like a user’s PC desktop, it should be made almost infinite … along the lines of the color selection screens available in the Suite 7/Suite R themes, but expanded to add font sizes, padding (spacing), etc.
“Themes” are not just about pretty colors. In different parts of the world, certain colors have much significance … and superstition! As an example, reds tend to be popular in parts of Asia, but blues are a no-no, as they are funereal colors.
I actually think “themes” should be configurable and “savable” as different variations, which are then selected when a User logs into SuiteCRM. By doing this, you just select the layout that is best-optimized for whatever device you are using at the time … your PC, pad, smartphone, etc.
I just installed a copy of Suite 7.9 for testing purposes, to be honest the new theme was an instant turn of for me and my colleagues. We’ve now enabled SuiteR as per the instructions here (phew). Since SuiteR seems to work just fine with 7.9, I can’t understand why it would be provided in the download, but disabled in the code.
The main thing I would recommend to fix SuiteP is a radical re-think of the colour choices, the contrast is very poor, and to my mind not good enough to pass accessibility tests, which makes deployment of 7.9 with SuiteP in any organisation where such things are likely to be an issue impossible. My colour contrast analyser for shows a lot of fails. eg, The text in the login boxes is barely readable on my monitor.
The same applies to the box I’m typing the message in, grey text on a pale grey background is a really bad choice.