Instructions for admins

To add the Bird UI theme to your Mastodon instance follow these steps... meow..!

1. Add the files from the repo (elephant.scss) and the folder elephant to your Mastodon themes directory:

app/
  javascript/
    styles/
    elephant.scss                             | **new**
      contrast/
        ...
      fonts/
        ...
      elephant/                                   | **new**
        layout-multiple-columns.scss                               | **new**
        layout-single-column.scss                              | **new**

2. Add your theme to the config. This is what the default themes.yml looks like in Mastodon. To make your custom theme visible in settings, you need to add a new line in the form themeName: path/to/theme.scss. For example, the modern-dark theme would require adding modern-dark: styles/modern-dark.scss as a new line.

        default: styles/application.scss
        contrast: styles/contrast.scss
        mastodon-light: styles/mastodon-light.scss
        elephant: styles/elephant.scss      | **new**

3. Add a human-friendly name for the theme (optional). You can edit each desired language's locale file in config/locales/[lang].yml to add a localized string name for your theme's themeName as added in the previous step. For example, the default config/locales/en.yml contains localizations for the three default themes that ship with Mastodon, into the english language. You need to do this for every language you expect your users to use, or else they will see the unlocalized themeName directly.

          themes:
            contrast: Mastodon (High contrast)
            default: Mastodon (Dark)
            mastodon-light: Mastodon (Light)
            elephant: Elephant              | **new**

4. Compile theme assets and restart. Run RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails assets:precompile and restart your Mastodon instance for the changes to take effect.