@zendeskgarden/react-theming

What is @zendeskgarden/react-theming?

@zendeskgarden/react-theming is a package that provides theming capabilities for React applications. It allows developers to define and apply consistent design themes across their applications, ensuring a cohesive look and feel. The package is part of the Zendesk Garden design system, which offers a collection of React components and utilities for building user interfaces.

What are @zendeskgarden/react-theming's main functionalities?

ThemeProvider

The ThemeProvider component is used to apply a theme to a React application. It wraps the application or specific components, providing them with access to the theme properties defined in the theme object.

import { ThemeProvider } from '@zendeskgarden/react-theming';

const App = () => (
  <ThemeProvider theme={{ colors: { primaryHue: 'blue' } }}>
    <YourComponent />
  </ThemeProvider>
);

Theming with Styled Components

This feature demonstrates how to use styled-components with @zendeskgarden/react-theming. By using styled-components, you can create styled React components that automatically receive theme properties, allowing for dynamic styling based on the theme.

import styled from 'styled-components';
import { ThemeProvider } from '@zendeskgarden/react-theming';

const StyledButton = styled.button`
  background-color: ${props => props.theme.colors.primaryHue};
`;

const App = () => (
  <ThemeProvider theme={{ colors: { primaryHue: 'blue' } }}>
    <StyledButton>Click me</StyledButton>
  </ThemeProvider>
);

Other packages similar to @zendeskgarden/react-theming

styled-components

styled-components is a popular library for styling React applications using tagged template literals. It allows for CSS-in-JS styling and supports theming through its ThemeProvider. Compared to @zendeskgarden/react-theming, styled-components is more focused on styling and does not provide a design system like Zendesk Garden.

emotion

Emotion is a library designed for writing CSS styles with JavaScript. It offers powerful and flexible theming capabilities similar to styled-components. Emotion provides a ThemeProvider for managing themes, making it comparable to @zendeskgarden/react-theming in terms of theming functionality, but it does not include a design system.

material-ui

Material-UI (now MUI) is a popular React UI framework that includes a comprehensive theming solution. It provides a ThemeProvider and a wide range of pre-designed components. While it offers similar theming capabilities, Material-UI is more extensive in terms of component offerings compared to @zendeskgarden/react-theming.

README

@zendeskgarden/react-theming

The Theming package includes several utility components relating to theming and RTL capabilities in the Garden Design System.

Installation

npm install @zendeskgarden/react-theming

# Peer Dependencies - Also Required
npm install react react-dom styled-components

Usage

The ThemeProvider component can be used to apply granular theming to Garden (and custom) components. It is intended to be used at the root of an application to provide a global context for RTL. ThemeProvider components can be nested for areas that require additional, custom theming.

Theming

Garden provides several levels of customization, listed here from simple to complex, depending on your needs:

• Via the theme prop passed to ThemeProvider. Garden gives you access to many of the font, pixel, and color values used to style individual components. By modifying the theme you have the ability to customize whole aspects of the design system with minimal effort. Example: use theme to customize component primary accents with your brand color.
• Via the theme.components object within the theme prop. Using COMPONENT_ID keys, you can target precise CSS properties for customization. Example: use theme.components to override the 20px bottom margin of tabs.tablist.
• Via Garden's react-containers (outside the scope of this component). At some point, the flexibility provided by theme and theme.components has diminishing returns. If you find yourself fully re-skinning a component, then you should check out Garden's container abstractions. Example: retain the accessible keyboard behavior and RTL layout of Garden's tabs component with an alternate visual design (i.e. closer to the look of browser tabs).

RTL

import { ThemeProvider, DEFAULT_THEME } from '@zendeskgarden/react-theming';
import { Notification } from '@zendeskgarden/react-notifications';

<ThemeProvider theme={{ ...DEFAULT_THEME, rtl: true }}>
  <Notification>This notification content will render with RTL layout.</Notification>
</ThemeProvider>;

The withTheme HOC utility allows any component to interact with its ThemeProvider.

import { withTheme } from '@zendeskgarden/react-theming';

const Div = ({ theme, children }) => (
  <div style={{ direction: theme.rtl ? 'rtl' : 'ltr' }}>{children}</div>
);

const LocalizedComponent = withTheme(Div);

<ThemeProvider theme={{ ...DEFAULT_THEME, rtl: true }}>
  <LocalizedComponent>RTL localizable</LocalizedComponent>
</ThemeProvider>;