Themes
Install, activate and customise themes, including the bundled Simply theme.
TubePress dresses your site in two layers. The no-code Appearance screen restyles whatever theme is active, while the theme system — the subject of this page — decides the underlying templates and markup, WordPress-style. You install themes, keep several on hand, but run exactly one at a time.
Out of the box your site runs the bundled Simply theme. You can recolour it entirely from Appearance, swap it for another theme from the marketplace, or edit its files directly. None of that touches your content.
How theming works
A theme is a folder under themes/ containing PHP templates plus optional assets and helpers. The active theme owns the look of every front-end page; its values are layered with your Appearance settings at render time. Crucially, a theme only has to provide the templates it wants to change.
search.php, TubePress renders Simply's version instead. Simply is always present as the safety net, so a theme can be as small as a single overridden template.Installing & activating a theme
Everything happens at /admin/themes. The page lists your installed themes at the top and a marketplace grid below.
- Browse the marketplace. Free themes install in one click; paid themes are unlocked with credits once your account is connected. See the marketplace guide for connecting and buying.
- Install. The theme is downloaded and extracted into
themes/. It is now available but not yet live. - Activate. Press Activate on an installed theme to make it live. Only one theme is active at a time; the active theme cannot be uninstalled.
- Customise. The active theme shows a Customize button that jumps straight to Appearance.
An inactive theme can be removed with the trash icon (its files are deleted), and any theme offers a Reset action that clears that theme's saved settings without affecting another.
The Simply theme
Simply is the clean, modern default that ships with every install, and the fallback for any template a custom theme does not provide. It is the theme the entire Appearance screen drives: light and dark palettes, branding, layout, card and watch options all flow into Simply's templates. For most sites, recolouring Simply from Appearance is all the theming you will ever need.
The premium theme
TubePress also ships a token-driven premium styling layer. Rather than hard-coding colours, its stylesheet is written against the same CSS custom properties your Appearance palette generates (var(--primary) and friends) and is loaded after the base stylesheet. The practical upshot: the premium polish re-skins itself from the colour tokens you choose in Appearance → Colors — change one accent colour and the whole theme follows.
The theme editor
For hands-on tweaks, /admin/themes/editor gives the active theme a built-in code editor. A file tree on the left lists every theme file grouped by folder; selecting one opens it in a syntax-highlighted editor (PHP, CSS, JS, JSON, HTML). Save with the button or Ctrl+S / Cmd+S, and the editor warns you before you leave with unsaved changes. It is restricted to super-admins.
Switching themes safely
Activating or switching themes never touches your data. Videos, taxonomy, pages, users, comments and your core settings all live in the database, entirely separate from theme files. Each theme's own options are namespaced to that theme, so switching back and forth keeps every theme's customisations intact, and the Reset action only ever clears the settings, translation overrides and customisations belonging to the theme you reset. Try a theme, dislike it, and switch back — nothing is lost.
Next steps
Still stuck?
Open a ticket from your dashboard and our team will help you out.