Themes control the appearance of your site: the overall look and feel, including colors, fonts, and spacing.

OpenScholar periodically creates new themes to reflect the latest design trends and evolving web standards. Keeping a large set of themes compatible with new platform features, accessibility requirements, and innovations in front-end development is challenging, so over time we retire outdated themes and help anyone using them transition to new-and-improved designs.

The themes available for your site may vary based on the choices of your institution's leadership. When looking at the themes available for your site (under Control Panel > Appearance > Themes), you may see the following types of themes:

Standard theme - These themes are actively developed and fully supported. We are able to brand these themes with your institution's colors, fonts, and logos. See a list of the standard themes with examples. 

Legacy theme - These themes are not actively developed and support for them is limited. They often don't adhere to any branding standards. Users are encouraged to transition to one of the fully supported standard themes.

Deprecated theme - These themes are not actively developed and are not supported. A date for removing them from the system has been announced. Users should transition to a standard theme as soon as possible. If they do not select a new standard theme by the announced retirement date, OpenScholar staff will select a theme for them.