ckanext-midnight-blue-theme

A portable, modern theme implementation of CKAN's classic Midnight Blue theme, fully integrated with ckanext-theming.

By implementing the ckanext-theming workflow, this extension replaces traditional inline HTML/CSS templates with standard, decoupled UI macros. This ensures that the aesthetic and look of the original Midnight Blue theme is preserved while introducing a clean, maintainable, and modern macro-based architecture.

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Differences from core theme

This extension provides a faithful port of the original Midnight Blue theme but includes several modern layout improvements:

• Primary content layout blocks no longer rely on CSS float. Instead, they leverage native Bootstrap 5 grid layout classes (col).
• Integrates the flexible layout blocks structure, allowing you to easily customize the page layout. For example, add {% block page_layout %}no-sidebar{% endblock %} to hide the sidebar, or set it to sidebar-end to move the sidebar to the right.
• Employs Bootstrap 5 native styling for field validation errors. Fields with errors have a clean red outline and red helper text without a heavy red background.
• Cleaned up unnecessary markup; blocks such as header_account_notlogged are not rendered when a user is logged in, rather than rendering empty elements.

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Themes Provided

This extension registers the following theme with the ckanext-theming framework:

1. midnight-blue-portable: The primary theme applying the Midnight Blue layout and styles.

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Compatibility

CKAN version	Compatible?
2.11 and earlier	no (missing helpers)
2.12	yes

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Screenshots

Homepage

Dataset Search / Registry page

Dataset Detail page

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Installation

1. Install the Extension

Activate your CKAN virtual environment and install ckanext-midnight-blue-theme:

pip install ckanext-midnight-blue-theme

Or for development/source installation:

git clone https://github.com/DataShades/ckanext-midnight-blue-theme.git
cd ckanext-midnight-blue-theme
pip install -e .

2. Enable Plugins

Add midnight_blue_theme to the ckan.plugins list in your ckan.ini file:

ckan.plugins = ... midnight_blue_theme

3. Select the Theme

Set midnight-blue-portable as the active theme in your ckan.ini configuration:

ckan.ui.theme = midnight-blue-portable

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Development

If you'd like to run the test suite, run:

pytest

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License

AGPL-3.0