Themes & White-Labeling

Overview

The Theme Manager app personalizes the entire ControlBird interface. It lets you customize colors and typography across light and dark themes, and, on licensed tiers, apply white-label branding such as company logos, login copy, favicons, and support URLs. Themes are managed through a grid-based UI with color pickers and live preview cards.

Reach for the Theme Manager when you want dark mode for control-room monitoring, when you need the interface to match corporate branding, or when you ship ControlBird-powered solutions under your own brand as a system integrator or OEM. Themes apply individually per user, and an administrator can set a system-wide default that also styles the login screen seen before any user authenticates.

Key Concepts

A theme brings together three ideas:

• Variables: the colors, typography, and surface styling that control the look of windows, the taskbar, the login screen, and effects.
• White label: an optional branding set (company name, logo, login copy, favicon, support and documentation URLs), available on licensed tiers.
• Components: optional component-level style overrides.

How themes are applied

A custom theme is layered on top of the built-in defaults, so any value it does not set simply keeps the default. The active theme is also remembered in your browser so the interface is styled before login, ahead of your saved preference loading.

Built-in themes

Every deployment ships with a built-in default theme (light teal). Two more themes, Midnight (dark gold) and Monochrome (dark grayscale), are available out of the box.

What you can style

Theme styling spans:

• Colors: primary and secondary backgrounds, text, accent, and borders.
• Typography: font family and sizes.
• Windows & taskbar: title bars, window borders, taskbar styling.
• Login screen: background, inputs, and button styling.
• Effects: animations, gradients, shadows, and transition speed.
• State colors: danger, success, warning, and info states.
• Terminal: styling for the in-browser terminal.

Common Patterns

Per-user persistence

Each user's theme choice is saved to their account, so it persists across sessions and devices: logging in from anywhere restores the same appearance.

System default for new users and login

Administrators set the system-wide default theme. New users see this theme on first login, and the login screen itself is rendered with it. Setting the system default requires administrator privileges; regular users can only change their personal preference.

White-label branding

White-label branding (company name, logo, login copy, favicon, and support URLs) is available on the Professional and Enterprise tiers. The logo can be the default ControlBird mark, an image at a URL you provide, or custom markup. On tiers without white-labeling, the branding options are not shown.

Limitations & Troubleshooting

• White-labeling requires a licensed tier. If the branding options are missing, confirm your deployment is licensed for the Professional or Enterprise tier.
• Pre-login changes are not immediately visible. Because the interface is styled from a locally cached theme before login, a change made on another device is reflected only after you sign in and your saved preference loads.
• Custom theme names are auto-generated. If you do not supply a name, the editor generates one for you, and it does not check for name uniqueness.
• Active and default themes cannot be deleted. Deleting the currently applied theme is a no-op, and the built-in default theme cannot be deleted from the UI.
• Removed values fall back to defaults. Because a custom theme layers over the defaults, removing a value restores its default, though stale styling can linger briefly until the theme re-applies.