Things to Consider Before Publishing a Bolt Theme

Bolt makes it quite easy to create a theme from scratch or to port an existing one. But when it comes to publishing your newly created theme, make sure you take care of the following things:

Screenshot all The Things!

Show the world how cool your theme is and provide at least one screenshot. In the best case, you provide screenshots from the homepage, listing page and detail page.

In order to link them with your theme, you have to reference them in your theme’s composer.json.

Let’s say we have home.jpg, listing.jpg and detail.jpg stored inside a screenshots folder. Your extra section in your composer.json would look like this:

"extra": {
    "bolt-screenshots": [
        "screenshots/home.jpg",
        "screenshots/listing.jpg",
        "screenshots/detail.jpg"
    ]
}

Setup a Readme

Most simple themes will work out of the box. But if your theme has special functions or require some configuration to work, the README.md is your place to go for all these information.

Even if your theme is quite simple, it doesn’t hurt to put a quick description and installation instructions in there.

The Publishing Process

If all previous tasks are done, then you are almost ready to add your theme to the Bolt Store.

I suggest you to tag a new release on your git repository. That could be either 1.0 or 0.1, depending on the current state of your theme. A good approach is to follow semantic versioning.

Now you are prepared to add it to the Bolt Store. I won’t explain the whole process in detail, because it’s straightforward.

You log into your account, click on Submit an Extension, fill in all details and hit the submit button.

For the description field, it’s a good thing to put in a note that the user can find more information in your readme file on github.

The Update Process

Now the git tags come into play. When you push an update for your theme, you should increase the version number with a new git tag.

The most important step is to hit the Update button in the Bolt Store. You’ll find it when you login to your account and click on Your Profile. Without this, Bolt wouldn’t notice the update and your users may miss it.

I hope this helped you with your theme and publishing process. If you have further questions or problems, don’t be shy and just ask me in the Bolt Slack Channel (username: phillipp)