We're thrilled to announce the release of
xSwatch5 v2.0, a complete refresh of the beloved xSwatch theme family for XOOPS. This release brings your site into the modern web with
Bootstrap 5.3.8, and adds some features we think you'll genuinely enjoy using every day.
Pick Your Look, Live The headline feature is the brand-new
Theme Switcher right in your navbar. With a single click, your visitors can instantly switch between any of the
21 bundled Bootswatch variants — Cerulean, Cosmo, Slate, Darkly, Lux, Minty, and more. No page reload, no admin panel, no fuss. Their choice is remembered across visits.
Even better: the switcher builds its list automatically from the theme's CSS folders. Drop a new variant directory in, and it appears in the dropdown. No configuration, no code changes, no cache to clear.
Light Mode, Dark Mode, Your Call Right next to the theme picker lives a Dark/Light toggle button with a clear label so users always know what they'll get. It uses Bootstrap 5's native Color Modes API, which means each Bootswatch variant now includes both light and dark styles in a single CSS file. That's half the CSS payload compared to the old dual-stylesheet approach.
On first visit, the theme respects the visitor's OS preference. Once they make a choice, it sticks — saved to browser storage with no cookies, no tracking, no HTTP overhead. A tiny script runs before the page paints, so there's never a flash of the wrong theme.
Right-to-Left, Out of the Box For the global XOOPS community,
v2.0 ships with automatic
RTL support. The theme reads the _TEXT_DIRECTION constant from your language pack and Bootstrap 5's logical properties handle the rest — spacing, alignment, dropdowns, and layouts all mirror correctly for Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and other RTL languages.
The Foundation: Modern, Accessible, Clean Under the hood, every template has been rebuilt for
Bootstrap 5.3.8. That meant touching dozens of files across the main theme and module overrides for 13 popular XOOPS modules — newbb, publisher, wggallery, xoopsfaq, and more. Along the way we:
- Dropped jQuery dependency from Bootstrap (XOOPS core still uses it, but the theme itself is vanilla JS)
- Tightened WCAG AA contrast across every color combination in every variant
- Fixed absolute image paths so subdirectory installs work correctly
- Cleaned up dead code, duplicate selectors, and BS3 leftovers
- Switched to the current form renderer (XoopsFormRendererBootstrap5)
Compatibility xSwatch5 v2.0 works on XOOPS 2.5.11 and later. The theme runs cleanly on 2.5.11 with RTL auto-detection becoming active on 2.5.12+. PHP 8.2 or newer required.
A Family Legacy This release stands on the shoulders of years of community work. The xSwatch story began in 2016 with
Richard Griffith's (Geekwright) original theme, evolved through Bootstrap 3 and 4, and got its first Bootstrap 5 migration from
Alain01 in 2023. v2.0 builds on all of that — keeping what worked, polishing what didn't, and adding the live theme switching that users have been asking for.
Get It Now https://github.com/mambax7/xswatch5 Drop it into your XOOPS themes/ directory, select it in the admin panel, and you're done. We'd love to hear what you think — and if you build a new Bootswatch variant, remember: it just takes a folder drop to get it into the switcher.
Happy theming.
