Getting Started

The default theme that ships with WHMCS is called the Twenty-One theme.

If you wish to customise any of the themes that ship by default with WHMCS, we recommend using the Child Themes functionality.

Creating a Child Theme

Please see Child Themes for more information.

Creating a Custom Theme

If you wish to create a new Parent Theme (that other themes can inherit from and be a child of), or are using WHMCS 8.0 or earlier, you can create a Custom Theme. For all other scenarios, we recommend using Child Themes.

The first step is to create your own copy of the template. This ensures your customisations are not lost when updating.

Method 1: Using Source Control

If you’re familiar with Git version control, we make our system themes and order form templates available as read-only repositories on GitHub. You can use these to build your template in a way that can be tracked and automatically updated.

To use this, navigate to the WHMCS templates directory:

$ cd ~/whmcs/templates/

Then, clone the repository into your new template directory:

$ git clone https://github.com/WHMCS/templates-six.git my-template-name

Next, you can customise your system theme or order form template.

Method 2: Without Source Control

Alternatively, if you aren’t familiar with Git version control or don’t wish to use it, you can make a copy of the template directory within WHMCS.

To do this, copy the theme or order form template directory (for example, ~/templates/twenty-one/) to ~/templates/yourname/.

Next, you can customise your system theme or order form template.