Staging Themes

Multiple themes can be installed on your Neto by Maropost site, but only one will be your live theme. Other installed themes are often referred to as "staging themes". It is good practice to make any major changes to your website on a staging theme first. This allows you to preview the changes before setting them live and easily roll back to your previous theme if needed.

Create a Staging Theme

To create a staging theme:

1. Connect to your site using SFTP and navigate to the following path:

   /httpdocs/assets/themes

   This folder contains a list of themes installed on your site.

2. To create the new theme, you can either:

   • Duplicate your live theme or any installed theme's folder (and all its contents) with a new folder name.
   • Upload a theme folder from your local machine.

   You can name your staging theme anything you like, but best practice is to include the year and month the staging theme was created, the original theme's name, and some information of what was changed. Examples of good staging theme names would be:

   • 2024-09-skeletal-homepageredesign
   • 2024-12-bespoke-00123456 (when Neto designers create staging themes, the support or design case number is often included for reference)

Preview a Theme

To preview any theme installed on your site (without setting it live), you can use the nview query string.

https://my-site.neto.net.au/?nview=[THEME-NAME]

For example:

• https://my-site.neto.net.au/?nview=2024-09-skeletal-homepageredesign
• https://my-site.neto.net.au/?nview=2024-12-bespoke-00123456

Return to Viewing your Live Theme

The nview configuration will be saved against your browser session as a cookie. You will continue to view your site using the theme specified until you reset the nview for your browser.

To reset the nview configuration for your browser session and resume viewing your live site, specify an empty nview query string on the end of your URL like below:

https://my-site.neto.net.au/?nview=

For this reason you should never hardcode nview query strings into your theme code. If this was ever deployed to a live theme and a customer accessed a staging theme there is effectively no way to revert their browser back to the live theme without providing the nview reset. Only use the nview query for testing and development by directly adding it to the URL in your browser.

Set your Staging Theme Live

You can set a staging theme live from the Webstore Settings page using the Site template set dropdown menu. Detailed instructions on how to activate a new theme can be found here.