CMS Hub Themes: What These Updates Mean For You

Earlier this month, we took a look at HubSpot’s latest offering, CMS Hub. While HubSpot has offered a CMS for several years, this marks a huge step in strengthening features and functionality for the platform. The ultimate goal of CMS Hub is to improve the website creation and editing experience for both marketers and developers. 

Perhaps one of the biggest developments is the expansion of themes and their capabilities. But how exactly is your experience with themes different on CMS Hub? Keep reading to find out. 

General Website Theme Updates in CMS Hub 

CMS Hub brings increased theme functionality and a new global content editor to HubSpot’s sites. Previously, developers had to use global groups or modules within design manager, with a single mistake having the potential to negatively impact an entire website. With CMS Hub’s themes, that’s no longer a problem, due to these new features:  

• The new global content editor removes the need to code to make site-wide changes and allows CMS Hub users to edit global areas of your website in one interface. This editor also gives you a live preview of your total changes as you go along.
• Users can also package related assets in the design manager in a more formal way. You can designate a folder as a theme, and then everything in that form will be part of that specified theme. This can be anything from CSS, JS, modules, templates, and more. Then, when you’re in the global content editor, elements from that theme will be highlighted. For example, if you’re editing a page where you can place modules, the sidebar in the editor will show you any modules available from that page’s theme. 
• When selecting a template for a page, you can now browse by theme, which makes it easier to know which modules and templates work together, and which you should select for your site’s design. 

Theme Settings Updates in CMS Hub 

After you have a HubSpot theme installed in your design manager, users can make updates to the colors, fonts, or global styles using the new “Theme Settings” tool. This tool is similar to the global content editor, but it impacts the styling across all custom and default modules throughout your site and blog. Notable updates include:

• The new settings tool makes it possible to create a settings menu in HubSpot’s UI, where the settings can be used in any assets in the corresponding theme. These settings are global to the whole theme. 
• Developers can use the settings tool however they want, but generally, it’ll be used for color and font settings. This makes creating customized themes simpler than ever. For instance: 
• You could include fields to control a few accent colors to set them to your brand colors.
• You could include a field that sets a default hero background image.
• You could include a field that gives the option to toggle on or off a sticky header sitewide.
• You could include a field that offers a choice of different button styles.

For a better idea on how creative you can get using the settings tool, here is a look at the kinds of fields you can use:

• Boolean (i..e, a checkbox), which you would use to toggle a specific setting on or off.
• Choice (i.e., dropdown), which you would use to offer the user a choice between multiple styles.
• Color
• Font (including font family, size, and weight).
• Image
• Number, which you might use to create control button padding.

Before this update, if you wanted to include any customization options, you’d have to scope to the template. These new capabilities allow users to create global settings that affect templates from one singular place. 

But, interestingly enough, you can also choose to ignore settings if you want to simply use themes to group assets. This alone is useful and allows CMS Hub users to better understand how sites are put together. However, if you choose to use settings or not, you can make the universal theme you created with CMS Hub available on the HubSpot marketplace. 

To Sum It Up

CMS Hub is still in its early stages, but so far, this new standalone system from HubSpot has already shown it can open up a world of possibilities for companies looking to create dynamic websites. If you want to know more about CMS Hub, keep an eye out for more upcoming blogs or reach out today for a one-on-one discussion!