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Theme Presets

A preset is your site's design — colors, fonts, spacing, layout — packaged as a small JSON file you can share with another society. They send you their preset; you import it; your site instantly takes on their look. Your content, members, logo, and configuration are not touched.

What you can do

  • Export your current look as a JSON file. Save it as a backup or hand it to another society.
  • Import a preset from another society. The site immediately takes on its look.
  • Browse the public Theme Gallery at https://getsocietypress.org/themes/ for curated starter presets.
  • Submit your preset to the Gallery for other societies to discover.

How to export your look

SocietyPress → Theme Presets → Export.

  • Name — defaults to "[Your Society] theme." Edit if you want.
  • Description — optional. A short note explaining the look ("Navy + gold palette, Garamond headings, generous spacing for older readers").

Click Download Preset. A .json file lands in your Downloads folder. That's it. Send it as an email attachment to the society that asked for your look. Or hold it as a backup before experimenting with imports.

How to import a preset

SocietyPress → Theme Presets → Import.

Pick the .json file. Click Apply Preset. The site picks up the new colors, fonts, and spacing immediately — refresh the front-end and you'll see the change.

Before you do this for the first time, export your current preset first as a backup. If you don't love the imported look, re-import your original to roll back.

What's in a preset

Just design tokens. Specifically:

  • All seven palette colors (primary, primary hover, accent, header bg, header text, footer bg, footer text, footer link).
  • Body font + heading font (from a list of 10 web-safe / Google Fonts options).
  • Font size scale + heading size scale (compact / comfortable / large).
  • Content width (narrow / standard / wide / custom in pixels).
  • Header height + logo height + header padding.
  • Nav font size + nav spacing + nav font weight.
  • A few binary toggles (show header title, show social icons).

What's NOT in a preset

Presets deliberately exclude anything site-specific or sensitive:

  • Your logo. Logos are media-library uploads tied to a specific install.
  • Members, events, content, photos, donations, anything in the database.
  • Your organization's name, address, contact info.
  • Stripe / PayPal credentials, API keys, any secrets.
  • PHP code, templates, or files of any kind. A preset is a JSON file with maybe two dozen number/string values. Open it in any text editor before importing — what you see is what gets applied.

This is by design. A preset is the minimum needed to express a look. Anything bigger crosses into "you're trusting the source."

How the Theme Gallery works

https://getsocietypress.org/themes/ is a curated catalog of presets. As of this writing it ships with five starter presets matching the five GPL child themes:

  • Heritage — Navy & Gold (formal serif, the classic society feel)
  • Coastline — Blue & Sand (clean sans-serif, coastal)
  • Prairie — Earth Tones (slab-serif, agricultural region feel)
  • Parlor — Vintage Burgundy (Palatino, 19th-century parlor)
  • Ledger — Slate & Cream (modern professional, library-focused)

Click any card → Download Preset → save the JSON. Then import it via SocietyPress → Theme Presets → Import. Two clicks from "I want that look" to "my site has that look."

To submit your preset for the Gallery, use the Submit your preset link at the bottom of the Gallery page. Reviewed presets get listed for other societies to discover.

How presets and child themes interact

The five child themes (Heritage, Coastline, Prairie, Parlor, Ledger) shipped with SocietyPress include their own palette-on-activation hooks — when you activate Heritage, the palette flips to navy+gold automatically.

The matching preset (also called Heritage) sets the exact same tokens via the Theme Presets path. The end result is identical.

The difference: child themes carry PHP, custom widget areas, and template overrides; presets are tokens only. Most societies are well-served picking a child theme + importing the matching preset, then tweaking individual settings under SocietyPress → Settings → Design.

If you want to change palettes without changing themes, just import a different preset. The active child theme stays the same.

What the future tiers add

Tier 1 (presets — what's described here) is the foundation. Two more tiers on the roadmap:

  • Tier 2 — Themed Bundle — a .spchildtheme archive with tokens.json + custom.css + image assets. Same import flow, but the bundle can carry custom CSS rules and asset images. CSS is sanitized (no @import, no script injection) so the security boundary stays intact.
  • Tier 3 — Full Child Theme — a WordPress child theme with PHP, templates, custom functions. Carries real risk; gated behind a manual SocietyPress review with a "Reviewed by SocietyPress" badge before listing in the Gallery.

Tier 2 and Tier 3 don't exist yet. Tier 1 is what's shippable today.

If something looks wrong

The Import button says "Preset format not recognized." The JSON file is from somewhere else (not a SocietyPress preset). Double-check you grabbed it from the Gallery or another SocietyPress site's export. The format key in a valid preset is "format": "societypress.preset.v1".

I imported a preset and the site looks identical. Either the preset's tokens matched your current ones (unlikely if you actually picked a different look), or browser cache. Hard-refresh the front-end with Cmd+Shift+R / Ctrl+Shift+R.

My logo is gone after import. It shouldn't be — presets don't touch the logo. Check SocietyPress → Settings → Design → Logo — the logo media-library reference is on that page.

I want to undo an import. Re-import your original preset (the one you exported as a backup before importing the new one). If you didn't export a backup first, manually adjust the tokens via SocietyPress → Settings → Design and the Customizer.

The Gallery page is empty. Visit https://getsocietypress.org/themes/ in a browser; it should show 5 starter presets. If it's blank, the SocietyPress site (yours, not getsocietypress.org) has a network or cache issue — the Gallery itself doesn't depend on your site.

Related guides

  • Setup Wizard — picks the initial child theme + initial palette
  • Page Builder — design tokens drive the page-builder rendering