Editing the default templates

When Nesta serves a web page or CSS file, it will look for templates inside a views folder in your project. If it can't find the templates it needs in there, it'll have a look in the views folder inside the currently configured theme, and failing that it'll fall back on the default templates in the gem.

All you need to do to tweak the defaults slightly is to copy the template that you want to change into your project, and edit it (if you want to make a new design from scratch, see the docs on creating a custom design).

You can have a look inside the default views folder with this command:

$ ls $(bundle show nesta)/views

Then you could copy one of those templates into your project, like this:

$ cd mysite.com
$ mkdir -p views
$ cp path/to/nesta-gem/views/sidebar.haml views/

You can also copy Sass files around in just the same way:

$ cp path/to/nesta-gem/views/master.sass views/

Fire up your site with bundle exec mr-sparkle config.ru, and you'll be able to see your changes in action.

There's just one gotcha. If the template you're redefining is rendered with a layout (i.e. it's a top level template such as page.haml) then Sinatra will expect to find the layout in the same directory as the template itself. In these cases you'll also need to copy layout.haml into views:

$ cp path/to/nesta-gem/views/layout.haml views/

If you're only overriding templates that are rendered from within another template (Rails calls them "partials") then you won't need a local copy of the layout.haml file. You can easily identify which templates are which by searching the Nesta code for "= haml", and checking whether they're called with :layout => false.

Of course, this means that if the only template that you'd like to edit is the layout, you'll also need to copy templates that are rendered with :layout => true into the same folder, even though you have no intention of editing them.

Overriding themes

As mentioned above, when Nesta tries to render a template it begins by looking in the views directory within your project, then (if a theme is in use) it checks the theme's views directory, and finally the views in the Nesta gem.

This means that you can override a theme just easily as you can override the defaults, by grabbing a theme's templates and copying them into views.