Theme Studio is JekCMS's new visual design environment, available exclusively in v1.4.0 and later. It lets developers and designers build, preview, and export themes directly from the browser — no local environment needed. Connect it to any live JekCMS installation and see your changes reflected in under 200 milliseconds.
Theme Studio connects to your JekCMS installation via a read/write API token scoped exclusively to theme assets. Changes are transmitted over a WebSocket connection and previewed in an embedded iframe that refreshes without a full page reload. The median time from saving a CSS change to seeing it in the preview is 140ms on a same-region server; cross-region latency adds 60–80ms.
Server-Side Compilation — No Local Toolchain
Asset compilation runs server-side. There is no local Node.js, Vite, or webpack process required. CSS variables defined in the theme's variables.json file appear as form controls — colour pickers, sliders, dropdowns — in Theme Studio's sidebar. Changing a variable updates every component that references it in the preview simultaneously.
Clean Export, No Lock-In
Export generates a clean ZIP of the theme directory. The output is byte-for-byte identical to a manually built theme — no Theme Studio metadata, no dependencies on Theme Studio being installed. The exported theme can be distributed through the JekCMS theme marketplace or installed directly.
Licensing and Access
Theme Studio is included with all JekCMS Agency and Enterprise licenses. Standard license holders can access a read-only preview mode that allows reviewing how a theme will look on their installation before purchasing.