New themes are here

[lubos]

The latest version (26.5.9.3563) has a new custom theme framework, which will allow you to customize any View screen. I know custom themes are not a new concept in Manager, but I feel this custom theme framework should be the final one.

Two reasons:

1. These custom themes will be supported forever.
2. They offer unlimited flexibility.

From the user interface point of view, not much is changing. Custom Themes are still under the Settings tab.

You still select the theme on forms:

The only minor improvement is that when viewing a document with a custom theme applied, you will see a notice making it obvious the view is using a custom theme, and you can toggle the custom theme on/off. This is good for troubleshooting. There is also a pencil icon which will allow you to modify the custom theme within the document you are looking at so you can keep improving the theme until it’s just right.

The biggest change is actually the theme itself. When you click the New Theme button under the Custom Themes screen, I will no longer pre-fill the default theme (which is rather large and very generic). Instead, I will prefill with a stub to explain fundamentals.

Nobody. I repeat, nobody is expected to author custom themes by hand anymore. The stub is designed to contain all the information an AI agent needs to craft a new custom theme. You can use ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc., to copy & paste this stub into an AI prompt with your instructions, and your AI tool should generate a new HTML file which you can copy & paste into Manager as a custom theme.

The themes which you build from this stub will be supported forever. So this eliminates a major pain point when upgrading to newer versions. You don’t have to worry about your custom themes suddenly being broken anymore.

[Ealfardan]

Although I agree with most of the improvements, I still find this a little bit hard to swallow:

@lubos

Nobody. I repeat, nobody is expected to author custom themes by hand anymore.

That’s not future proof. AI, much like many other internet products, is an internet tool that starts out as free but will soon be monetized heavily. We have just had this experience with Theme Enhancer and soon all other AI bots will follow suit, either by charging a fee, downgrading the product, or introducing ads or other horrible intrusive code.

Also, AI currently cannot do absolutely anything, that is unless the user is willingly taking the time to guide it through unlimited revisions and many countless hours just to give big tech bots free training that I will have to pay later on – not to mention that the end product will work, but it’s going to be patches upon patches of endless sloppy logic that cannot be touched again by a human hand.

This means this is a future trap to be locked into big tech AI and I hope we did not reach that stage already.

[lubos]

@Ealfardan we are talking about HTML themes which will have around 500 lines of generated code. Even if you get to the point where you get stuck, just throw it away and make AI create a new theme for you.

Also, making a new theme is a one-time thing. Once you have it, it will work forever. Please try to create a new theme yourself using AI. You will be impressed.

[Ealfardan]

I will give it a try

[Moh_Batarfi]

How will code Theme using Al

For example we need break line between rows and change headers row background color.

[lubos]

You can feed AI the code that you see when you click New Theme button along with your requirements and let it do its work. But it’s important AI agent can browse the web because it needs to read OpenAPI spec documentation. If AI agent can’t browse the web, it will make things up and the theme that it will produce will not work.

Anyway, let’s just wait for someone to try it and see what they say. I can confirm ChatGPT can create custom themes for Manager.io easily.

[Hazem]

Regarding the new theme update in Manager.io:

If you are using an old custom HTML theme and facing issues after the latest update, here is a simple solution that worked for me:

1. Go to:
   Settings > Custom Themes

2. Open your old custom theme and copy the full HTML code.

3. Paste the code into ChatGPT or Claude AI.

4. Then go back to:
   Settings > Custom Themes > Create New Theme

5. You will see the new default theme code. Copy that code as well and paste it into ChatGPT or Claude AI together with your old theme code.

6. Ask the AI to update your old HTML theme so it becomes compatible with the new Manager.io update based on the new default theme structure.

I tried this with one of my invoice themes and it worked perfectly.
I have another custom theme that I will test tomorrow.

The one thing i faced after update the custom fileds not show immediately after update sometimes
I have to refresh the page multiple times to show custom fileds
I don’t know if this issue from my code or from the update.

I will try with another theme tomorrow.

[lubos]

@Hazem great to see it’s working.

I would prefer everyone on old custom themes to migrate to new ones. Old custom themes had dependency on Liquid markup or postMessage API.

New custom themes are pure HTML/Javascript/CSS. Guaranteed to be future-proof.

[Hazem]

Thank you @lubos for all the great work to develop Manager.io

I hope someone can write the best prompt for AI to describe to it how to update the code.

I’m not developer and i don’t know how to code i just use AI

[lubos]

The starting theme stub in Manager contains much of the prompt from technical point of view. If something is missing there that should be mentioned, then I’ll add it.

[Moh_Batarfi]

can someone help to code theme like this, it’s very sample

[ntrim]

I tried to create a new theme using Gemini, but it doesn’t work properly (the invoice lines and dates are missing).

I also tried the way of @Hazem, with ChatGPT and it works perfectly. It merged the old theme with the new code and the result is exactly like the plain theme I was using.

Thank you @Hazem for the trick and @lubos for all the great work!

[lubos]

I’ve noticed Gemini won’t go to the internet to read OpenAPI spec so it just makes educated guess on the shape of data which will be incorrect (that’s why theme won’t work properly).

The workaround is to copy paste OpenAPI spec to Gemini or just use ChatGPT or Claude.

[Wornout]

@Ealfardan

AI currently cannot do absolutely anything

I use it all the time . What people don’t realize is that its all in the way you ask the prompts. I have created some amazing codes in excel and access data base with the help of GPTChat and the free one at that. Notice I said help as yes it still does take a bit of input from the end user to know how to word the prompts. I can even down load PDFs and GptChat will turn it into a table I just have to copy and paste. I love it have just booked into a course to gain a qualification about it . Its the future and I want to be part of that.

[Raikkonen]

Can we create themes for the reports module?

[a.alghofaily]

where we can find the default theme template ?

[Stichting_Bon_Artz]

and can we influence it?

after the recent update I find we’ve lost HTML in certain text boxes like Business Info (we had a clickable email adress there) and the normal text across the doc (like an invoice PDF) is larger than it used to be

[lubos]

@Raikkonen

Can we create themes for the reports module?

So far I’ve added Custom Theme checkbox on profit and loss statement and balance sheet report but I will add the checkbox to all reports in upcoming days. So yes - you can create themes for reports too.

@a.alghofaily

where we can find the default theme template ?

It’s not directly exposed. I will directly expose it somewhere in UI.

@Stichting_Bon_Artz

after the recent update I find we’ve lost HTML in certain text boxes like Business Info (we had a clickable email adress there) and the normal text across the doc (like an invoice PDF) is larger than it used to be

default theme is restricted but your custom theme can do anything you like

Use custom theme to allow raw HTML in your fields

Default theme in the latest version (26.5.10) no longer allows raw HTML in fields. So for example, if you used HTML in your fields like this: [image] Now it will show as: [image] This is for security reasons because in multi-user environment restricted user could potentially inject malicious HTML tags or they could simply insert malformed HTML and ruin the layout. If you want your view screens still support raw HTML, you will need to use custom theme. Either make your own custom theme to…

[ntrim]

How do we now get the value of the “Description” field in invoices to use in the custom theme?
It used to be {{description}}.
I tried ${esc(data.description)} but returns nothing.

Update

Found It: data.table.description

[Stichting_Bon_Artz]

thanks for the reply
I see that we can temporarily revert to the RAW html until we get time to correct the issues we face concerning this update.

Sadly there are two issue we face:

1. PDF conversion doesn’t follow the view. We can indeed alter the font size with custom theme (or raw html theme) but the PDF engine doesn’t follow.
2. In the meantime, sadly we cannot revert to an old version as the program tells us we cannot open the .manager business anymore as it was previously opened with the new version. Can we somehow circumvent this?