Themes - editing a theme without the changes being reflected elsewhere

Hi. I am still relatively new to Evolve, and I’m learning all the time. A colleague and I were just discussing themes and it led to a slight panic about something. In the main dashboard, you have the option to create a new theme, using the + Create theme button. Once you have created a theme, I believe I am right in saying you create a course with the theme, and it’s within the course itself that you edit the theme to your liking. So far, so good.

However, I joined a team that already has several themes, and created a course using one of them. If I have made changes to the look and feel of my course, do those changes write back to the theme - and therefore said changes will be reflected in every other course that uses the theme? If so, that’s slightly worrying. But that aside, is there a way to make changes to a theme in a course, and somehow turn off the write back feature? In other words, so that the changes I make are only limited to my course, and not every other course that uses the theme?

Hi Tim, as far as I’m aware and how I work, you will need to create your own theme for use with your course. Otherwise, any changes you make to a shared theme will be displayed in all courses that use that theme.

You can apply your theme to any course you create. And when you create a theme you can choose another theme as your starting point. Essentially duplicating the starting theme. Make sure your new theme is the one your course is using and then tweak that one.

To some extent you might be able to set up an ‘article style’ that’s only for use with your course and apply that to all your articles. I guess it depends on how extensive your changes are… if they’re minor that would work. Otherwise creating your own theme from one you want to customise is definitely the better method at this time.

Hi Tim.
Theme management in Evolve takes some getting used to. It’s awesome because you can make changes to all your courses easily, but also scary for that reason.
The workflow that I am using is that I maintain a master theme (for me that’s on a client by client basis, but it might be just the one if you’re working internally) and then I split them off as needed, which is rarely, using the method @BarryBPS mentioned above. I integrate changes into the master theme as needed and test them across the older modules.
For an internal team, I think it would be ideal to build a theme that is good for most the elearning needs in your organisation and have most people focus on content/build rather than tweaking the theme.