Themes not working in Lektor 3.1.1

lektor --version Lektor, version 3.1.1

Documentation implies Lektor now has theme support, but installing a new theme and setting it with the themes variable in .lektorproject results in the following:

Some of the files from the new theme get included in the new build.
But, the css file from the default quickstart project seems to stick around In the end it looks like the themes support is simply broken and that it fails silently.

The documentation should either be updated to reflect this reality, or the themes feature should be completed.

I tried to read the source code to see if I could fix it, but it’s way too complicated!

[nixjdm]

This sounds like you have conflicting files in your project as you do in your theme. When that happens your existing project files are used instead of the theme’s files. This is on purpose to allow the themes to be flexibly overridden.

Can you check this? Compare ls themes/[theme-name]/templates/ to ls templates/, for instance. Models would work the same way.

I do have a site using themes that works with 3.1.1 / master. I’m betting this what’s going on.

[nixjdm]

I agree that the documentation should be made more clear. Theming does work though, so since this is mainly a documentation issue I’m opening https://github.com/lektor/lektor-website/issues/240 and closing this issue.

Briefly, that workflow is not the end of the story. After your step 3 you’d need to modify your project to actually use the installed theme, and how precisely to do that depends on the theme (and your existing project, but in your example’s case it’s simply the quickstart).

like removing the default theme that quickstart created

At this time the quickstart does not use a theme. It is a normal, theme-less Lektor project. #535 would change that and hopefully make adopting a theme from the quikstart state a little easier. For now though, the expectation is that there are manual steps to use a newly installed theme after it’s installation.