Introducing the first custom bearblog theme repository

30 Oct, 2025

Article written by kami
Heya! So, theming in bearblog kind of sucks, right?¹
When you try and apply someone elses theme, you have to copy all of their css and paste it into your dashboard.

Not to mention finding themes. There's not really any standardized way of doing that - And there's often no good way of seeing every theme a particular person has made. You just have to hope they tag their stuff appropriately. And if you forget where you got a theme from? Too bad! Be prepared to go on a wild goose chase to find it again! (bears search isnt exactly incredible).

I'm not really much of a custom theme user myself, but I still felt like it was probably a good idea to fix this for all the people that might want to use custom themes.

So, I did!

Introducing Beartheme: A chrome extension you can go ahead and download right now!
(Here's the source code in case you enjoy looking at bad javascript code)

What does it do? How does it work? I'm glad you asked! By default, nothing will happen when you install the extension. To make stuff happen, you're going to need to add a theme repository. Theme repositories contain info about a bunch of themes you can install. Luckily for you, I've already set one up!

Here's how to add my "official" repo!
Step 1: Go into the options of the extension

Step 2: Copy paste https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AtIgnister/beartheme-repo/refs/heads/main/theme.json into the repo url field and click save.

Congratulations, you're done! You can now select any of the custom themes that are available! Go forth and theme! Just remember to save your css once you've applied a theme. If you want to add more repos: The list is comma seperated. So, just add a comma and then the url of the next repo after.

In case you have your own theme and want it added to the repo, you can just email me. But what if you want to make your own repo?

Well, thats as easy as just uploading a json file somewhere! Here's an example repo file:

[
    {
        "name": "My very cool theme",
        "author": "Kami",
        "website": "https://kami.bearblog.dev/blogpost-about-your-theme",
        "style_url": "link-to-the-raw-css-file.com/style.css",
        "thumbnail": "some-website.com/some-image.png"
    }
]

Add as many themes as you want, upload the json somewhere, and you're good! At that point you can just give people the url of the json file, and they can add it to their repos!

Now, I'll probably make both adding repos and creating them a lot more user-friendly at some point, but for now, this is how it works. Again, if you're a custom theme maker: Feel free to go and contact me! Or make your own repo!

Also: My email is always open in case theres any problems with the extension. This isn't my job or anything, so depending on your problem it might take a while for me to get back, but I will try my best to solve any issues you might have. There'll also be a firefox version coming soon™, but I'm gonna have to change the extension to work with manifest v2 for that, so it'll take a bit.

Anyways, have fun! I might make a follow-up post to this one discussing how exactly all of this stuff works and why I made some of the design decisions here, but for now: This is it :3

Oh, right: My email is kami@kamiscorner.xyz. It's also on my blog, but just in case, I'll mention it here.

#bearblog #guide #kami