sphinx_corpo_theme

A Sphinx theme with a modern corporate aesthetic, including templates for conventional documentation and blog posts. The design is inspired by the IBM documentation as of October 2025.

Note

While this theme covers almost all essential functionality, it remains a work in progress and will continue to evolve.

Theme options

The theme supports the following options to be used in the html_theme_options variable of your conf.py.

template_overrides

Enables overriding the default template for all documents within a specified directory hierarchy. Unlike Sphinx’s html_additional_pages, which targets individual files, this option applies to directories.

# uses 'blog.html' template for documents in 'blog' directory
'template_overrides' : {
    'blog/' : 'blog.html',
}

show_menu_bar

Show the menu bar at the top of each page. This bar is costumizable and have the company logo, website name and a menu. The default value is False.

menu_bar_items

List of entries to be show in the menu bar. Each entry is a dict with the following fields:

• title: text to label the menu entry;
• docname: optional reference to a document in the TOC tree;
• url: optional URL.

If docname is specified, the theme will use the relative path to that document. Otherwise, the url will be used.

'menu_bar_items': [
    {'title': 'Documentation', 'docname': 'docs/index'},
    {'title': 'Blog', 'docname': 'blog/index'}
    {'title': 'Products', 'url': 'https://example.com/products/'}
]

show_child_topics

If True, a list of child topics will be displayed after the document content for each page that do not have a visible toctree (i.e., including :hidden:). The default value is False.

show_parent_topic

If True, a link to the parent topic will be displayed after the document content. The default value is False.

toc_extra_links

List of entries to be shown at the bottom of the global TOC, in the side bar. Useful to provide external but related links. Each entry is a dict with the following fields:

• title: text to label the menu entry;
• url: destination URL.

Extra links use the target _blank so will open in another tab/window.

'toc_extra_links': [
    {
        'title': 'Astronomy in Wikipedia',
        'url': 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomy'
    },
    {
        'title': 'NASA website',
        'url': 'https://www.nasa.gov/'
    }
]

footer_statement

Optional text displayed at the bottom of each page, typically used for legal disclaimers or general information. Copyright details appear aligned to the right of this content.

footer_statement = "Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that also hosts a range of other projects. "

Metadata

The following metadata fields can be added to any RST document:

Field	Description
:template:	Override the template for the current document. This have precedence over template_overrides.
:author:	Name of the author of the document, only visible for blog posts. This value is injected as meta tag in the output HTML.
:subtitle:	Text to be shown below the blog title.
:description:	Short description of the content, only visible for blog posts. This value is injected as meta tag in the output HTML.
:last_updated:	Date the document was last updated. If omitted, the date the HTML was generated will be used.
:title_image:	Set the background image for a blog post header. The path is relative to the root of documentation.