Theme Structure and Layout

This section describes some basic ways to control the layout and structure of your documentation. This theme inherits its structure and section terminology from the Sphinx Basic NG theme.

Overview of theme layout

Below is a brief overview of the major layout of this theme. Take a look at the diagram to understand what the major sections are called. Where you can insert component templates in html_theme_options, we include the variable name in inline code. Click on section titles to learn more about them and some basic layout configurations.

Header / Navigation Bar

Logo

navbar_start

Section links

navbar_center

Components

navbar_end

Primary Sidebar

Links between pages in the active section.

sidebars

primary_sidebar_end

Article Header

article_header_start article_header_end

Article Content

Article Footer

article_footer_items prev_next_area

Secondary Sidebar

Within-page header links

secondary_sidebar_items

Footer content

content_footer_items

Footer

footer_start footer_end

Horizontal spacing

By default, the theme’s three columns have fixed widths. The primary sidebar will snap to the left, the secondary sidebar will snap to the right, and the article content will be centered in between.

• If one of the sidebars is not present, then the article content will be centered between the other sidebar and the side of the page.

• If neither sidebar is present, the article content will be in the middle of the page.

If you’d like the article content to take up more width than its default, use the max-width CSS property with the following selectors:

.bd-main .bd-content .bd-article-container {
  max-width: 100%;  /* default is 60em */
}

The above rule will set the article content max width to the same width as the top navigation bar. To truly use all of the available page width, you also need to set the following CSS rule:

.bd-page-width {
  max-width: 100%;  /* default is 88rem */
}

This will affect both the article content and the top navigation bar.

Note

If you use both of the custom CSS rules above, be sure to keep them as separate rules in your CSS file. If you combine them, the result will be a CSS selector that is less specific than the two default rules in the theme, and your custom CSS will fail to override the theme defaults.

Templates and components

There are a few major theme sections that you can customize to add/remove built-in components or add your own components. Each section is configured with a list of HTML templates — these are snippets of HTML that are inserted into the section by Sphinx.

You can choose which templates show up in each section, as well as the order in which they appear. This page describes the major areas that you can customize.

Note

When configuring templates in each section, you may omit the .html suffix after each template if you wish.

Header / Navigation Bar

Located in sections/header.html.

The header is at the top of the page above all other content and contains site-level information.

Header sections

The header is broken up into three sections. Each section is configured in conf.py with the following configuration:

• Left section: html_theme_options['navbar_start']

• Middle menu: html_theme_options['navbar_center']

• Right section: html_theme_options['navbar_end']

• Persistent right section: html_theme_options['navbar_persistent']

By default, the following configuration is used:

html_theme_options = {
# ...
"navbar_start": ["navbar-logo"],
"navbar_center": ["navbar-nav"],
"navbar_end": ["navbar-icon-links"],
"navbar_persistent": ["search-button"]
# ...
}

Warning

The Persistent right section is placed next to the navbar_end, but its elements will remain visible in the header even on small screens when all other elements are collapsed. It has been design for the search-button only and we cannot guarantee its compatibility with other components.

Configure the navbar center alignment

By default, the navigation bar center area will align with the content on your page. This equals the following default configuration:

html_theme_options = {
   # ...
   "navbar_align": "content"
   # ...
}

If instead, you’d like these items to snap to the left (closer to the logo), use this configuration:

html_theme_options = {
   # ...
   "navbar_align": "left"
   # ...
}

If you’d like these items to snap to the right of the page, use this configuration:

html_theme_options = {
   # ...
   "navbar_align": "right"
   # ...
}

Article Header

Located in sections/header-article.html.

The article header is a narrow bar just above the article’s content. There are two sub-sections that can have component templates added to them:

• article_header_start is aligned to the beginning (left) of the article header. By default, this section has the breadcrumbs.html component which displays links to parent pages of the current page.

• article_header_end is aligned to the end (right) of the article header. By default, this section is empty.

Primary sidebar (left)

Located in sections/sidebar-primary.html.

The primary sidebar is just to the left of a page’s main content. It is primarily used for between-section navigation. By default, it will show links to any siblings/children of the current active top-level section (corresponding to links in your header navigation bar).

Configuring it is a bit different from configuring the other sections because configuring the sidebar is natively supported in Sphinx, via the html_sidebars configuration variable.

For the primary sidebar only, you can configure templates so that they only show up on certain pages. You do so via a configuration like so in conf.py:

html_sidebars = {
    "<page_pattern>": ["list", "of", "templates"]
}

Any pages that match <page_pattern> will have their respective templates inserted. You can also * to do glob-style matching, and may use ** to match all pages.

By default, it has the following configuration:

html_sidebars = {
    "**": ["sidebar-nav-bs", "sidebar-ethical-ads"]
}

• sidebar-nav-bs.html - a bootstrap-friendly navigation section.

  When there are no pages to show, it will disappear and potentially add extra space for your page’s content.

• sidebar-ethical-ads.html - a placement for ReadTheDocs’s Ethical Ads (will only show up on ReadTheDocs).

Primary sidebar end sections

There is a special <div> within the primary sidebar that appears at the bottom of the page, regardless of the content that is above it.

To control the HTML templates that are within this div, use html_theme_options['primary_sidebar_end'] in conf.py.

By default, it has the following templates:

html_theme_options = {
  # ...
  "primary_sidebar_end": ["sidebar-ethical-ads"],
  # ...
}

Remove the primary sidebar from pages

If you’d like the primary sidebar to be removed from a page, you can use the following configuration in conf.py:

html_sidebars = {
  "pagename": []
}

This works for glob-style patterns as well. For example:

html_sidebars = {
  "folder/*": []
}

If you’d like to remove the primary sidebar from all pages of your documentation, use this pattern:

html_sidebars = {
  "**": []
}

Footer Content

Located in sections/footer-content.html.

The footer content is a narrow bar spanning the article’s content and the secondary sidebar. It does not contain anything immediately viewable to the reader but is kept as a placeholder in case theme developers wish to re-use it in the future.

Secondary Sidebar (right)

Located in sections/sidebar-secondary.html.

The in-page sidebar is just to the right of a page’s article content and is configured in conf.py with html_theme_options['secondary_sidebar_items'].

By default, it has the following templates:

html_theme_options = {
  # ...
  "secondary_sidebar_items": ["page-toc", "edit-this-page", "sourcelink"],
  # ...
}

To learn how to further customize or remove the secondary sidebar, please check Page Table of Contents.

Article Footer

Located in sections/footer-article.html.

The article footer exists just below your page’s article. By default, It does not contain anything immediately viewable to the reader, but is kept as a placeholder for custom or built-in templates.

html_theme_options = {
  # ...
  "article_footer_items": [],
  # ...
}

Hide the previous and next buttons

By default, each page of your site will have “previous” and “next” buttons at the bottom displayed in the prev_next_area. You can hide these buttons with the following configuration:

html_theme_options = {
  "show_prev_next": False
}

Content Footer

Located in sections/footer-content.html.

The content footer exists below your page’s article and secondary sidebar. By default it is empty, but you can add templates to it with the following configuration:

html_theme_options = {
  # ...
  "content_footer_items": ["your-template.html"],
  # ...
}

Footer

Located in sections/footer.html.

The footer is just below a page’s main content, and is configured in conf.py with html_theme_options['footer_start'], html_theme_options['footer_center'] and html_theme_options['footer_end'].

By default, footer_center is empty, and footer_start and footer_end have the following templates:

html_theme_options = {
  #...
  "footer_start": ["copyright", "sphinx-version"],
  "footer_end": ["theme-version"]
  #...
}

Within each subsection, components will stack vertically. If you’d like them to stack horizontally use a custom CSS rule like the following:

.footer-items__start, .footer-items__end {
  flex-direction: row;
}

Built-in components to insert into sections

Below is a list of built-in templates that you can insert into any section. Note that some of them may have CSS rules that assume a specific section (and will be named accordingly).

• breadcrumbs.html

• copyright.html

• edit-this-page.html

• footer-article/prev-next.html

• icon-links.html

• last-updated.html

• navbar-icon-links.html

• navbar-logo.html

• navbar-nav.html

• page-toc.html

• searchbox.html

• search-button.html

• search-field.html

• sidebar-ethical-ads.html

• sidebar-nav-bs.html

• sourcelink.html

• sphinx-version.html

• theme-switcher.html

• version-switcher.html

• indices.html

• theme-version.html

Add your own HTML templates to theme sections

If you’d like to add your own custom template to any of these sections, you could do so with the following steps:

1. Create an HTML file in a folder called _templates. For example, if you wanted to display the version of your documentation using a Jinja template, you could create a file: _templates/version.html and put the following in it:

   <!-- This will display the version of the docs -->
   {{ version }}
   

2. Now add the file to your menu items for one of the sections above. For example:

   html_theme_options = {
   # ...
   "navbar_start": ["navbar-logo", "version"],
   # ...
   }
   

Build date

By default this theme does not display the build date even when Sphinx’s html_last_updated_fmt variable is set. If you want the build date displayed, the theme includes a last-updated template that you can add to one of the page regions in your conf.py. For example:

conf.py

html_theme_options = {
    "content_footer_items": ["last-updated"],
    # other settings...
}

If you do specify html_last_updated_fmt but don’t include the last-updated template, the theme will still write the build date into a meta tag in the HTML header, which can be inspected by viewing the page source or extracted with an HTML parser. The tag will look like:

<meta name="docbuild:last-update" content="Aug 15, 2023">

The tag’s content attribute will follow the format specified in the html_last_updated_fmt configuration variable.