Customising Alaveteli

There are two ways to make your installation look and act the way you want. Some behaviour can be controlled with configuration settings. For more complex changes, you'll need to create a new theme.

Configuration settings

You can customise much of Alaveteli’s behaviour just by editing the configuration file. This complete list of Alaveteli’s config settings shows the sort of things you can control in this way.

Simple branding: colour and logo

It’s common to want to change the basic appearance of the site. Although you can simply edit the default templates and CSS to do this, we strongly recommend that you create a theme.

Themes do not need to be especially complex, but they allow your changes to work alongside the core code, which you can then update (when new releases or updates become available).

Need Alaveteli in a different language?

No problem! See the information about translating Alaveteli.

Complex changes

If you are a developer (or you have a team of programmers available) you can add any customisation that you want. But it’s important to do this without breaking the core code, so that you can accept new releases with updates. There’s more detail in the page about themes.

See also the documentation for developers.