Brightspot's standard theme includes front-end templates for attractively rendering articles, videos, listicles, promos, and much more. Admins can easily customize typefaces and colors of front-end elements, giving your electronic publication its distinctive look and feel without any developer intervention.
Nevertheless, your publication may need to deploy a template not included in Brightspot's standard edition. A web designer may want to add or move elements, or change styling requiring advanced CSS effects. Those changes are beyond the settings available to admins, and require custom development.
There are cases in which you may need to build a customized template from scratch using extremely low-level Handlebars and Less expressions. However, in many cases you can leverage one of Brightspot's existing templates by replacing some blocks of Handlebars, JSON, and Less code to quickly deploy the customized template that you need. In the tutorial "Creating a new list style from an existing one," we address the scenario of a web designer requiring a new list style for rendering promos. The original template has a single lead promo and a row of four smaller promos underneath. By the end of the tutorial, the new list style has a single lead promo with eight smaller promos underneath, modified placement for text, and modified styling. The skills acquired in that tutorial help you develop other templates by leveraging existing ones.
