1. Executive Summary

Dhonu is a premium interface theme for Dolibarr ERP/CRM. It replaces the standard back-office chrome with a light, minimal and information-dense design: a white full-height navigation rail carrying the brand, a white top bar spanning the content column, a very light canvas, white cards with hairline borders, and a medium-blue primary supported by green, turquoise, orange and pink accents.

Dhonu is delivered as a Dolibarr MODULE rather than a CSS-only theme. A stylesheet can only recolour existing markup; it cannot create a navigation rail, a dashboard, a mail workspace or an application manager. Shipping as a module lets Dhonu inject its assets on every page, provide its own menu manager, and add four purpose-built workspaces — without modifying a single file of the Dolibarr core.

Everything Dhonu displays is read from real Dolibarr tables. Where the reference design showed a web-analytics metric with no ERP equivalent (page views, bounce rate, regional traffic), the metric is mapped onto a documented business equivalent and labelled as that business metric. No figure on any screen is invented, and a panel with no data shows an explicit empty state rather than a placeholder number.

2. Theme Overview

Commercial name	Dhonu
Technical name	dhonu (module class modDhonu)
Module identifier	10000640
Version	1.0
Editor	DoliResources — https://www.doliresources.com
Licence	GPL-3.0-or-later
Package	module_dhonu-1.0.zip
Dolibarr compatibility	16.0 and later (developed and verified on 17.0.3)
PHP requirement	7.0 minimum; verified on PHP 8.1
Languages	English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Portuguese
Core files modified	None

 

3. Design Objectives

·       Reproduce the reference design faithfully: rail, top bar, accent-barred cards, KPI tiles, combined charts, mail workspace, application manager and sign-in screen.

·       Stay comfortable across long working sessions: high information density, quiet colour, generous contrast, no decorative motion.

·       Keep every Dolibarr behaviour intact — menus, permissions, multi-entity, hooks and third-party modules must continue to work untouched.

·       Remain configurable without code: palette, layout, rail mode, header mode, density, typography, radius, shadows, borders and animations are all administrator settings.

·       Ship no external runtime dependency: charts are inline SVG, icons come from the Font Awesome build Dolibarr already bundles.

4. UI/UX Philosophy

Dhonu's signature is a short coloured bar preceding every card and KPI title. It is rendered as generated content on the heading itself, so it can never be separated from its title, and it gives a page a consistent reading rhythm without adding chrome.

·       Surfaces: white cards on a very light canvas, 1px hairline borders, 8px radius, soft shadow.

·       Colour carries meaning, never decoration: green for favourable movement, red for adverse, amber for attention, blue for the primary action.

·       Never colour alone: status is always also carried by an icon, a label or a weight change, so the interface stays readable for colour-blind users and in monochrome print.

·       Empty states are explicit. A panel with no data says so; it never shows a zero that could be mistaken for a measured value.

 

5. Dhonu Dashboard

The landing workspace. It replaces the Dolibarr home page through the theme's main hook, and can be turned off so the native home page returns.

5.1 KPI cards

Four headline tiles, each with its accent bar, a round tinted icon plate, the figure and a period-over-period movement:

·       Total orders — count of customer orders, compared with the preceding period.

·       Total revenue — invoiced turnover over the selected period. The amount column (excl./incl. tax) and the invoice statuses counted are configurable.

·       Active customers — distinct customers invoiced over the period. The comparison period uses the same definition, so the movement compares like with like.

·       Conversion rate — signed proposals over proposals that reached a DECISION (signed or refused). Still-open proposals are deliberately excluded from the denominator: including them would sink the rate and make a healthy pipeline read as a failing one.

Every tile links to the matching Dolibarr list, pre-filtered to the same period and status scope as the tile, so the list total reconciles with the figure shown.

5.2 Business performance overview

A combined twelve-month chart drawn as inline SVG: invoiced revenue as columns, order count as a line, new customers as a dashed line. The three series live on very different scales, so each is normalised against its own maximum; plotting counts and money on one raw axis would flatten the counts into the baseline. Hovering a column reveals the exact month and amount. Export and Import buttons lead to the native Dolibarr tools.

5.3 Customer value distribution

The reference design's bubble chart, read as an ERP metric: one bubble per customer, turnover on the horizontal axis, number of documents on the vertical, and bubble AREA proportional to the customer's share of turnover. Area — not radius — carries the value, because a linear radius exaggerates large accounts roughly quadratically.

5.4 Goal achievement metrics

Three concentric arcs and a matching list: sales target, order intake and collection rate. Targets are administrator settings; when one is unset, Dhonu derives it from the same window a year earlier — but only when that window is a credible baseline. On a young install the year-ago figure can be a rounding error, which would report achievement in the thousands of percent, so below a tenth of the current value the baseline is treated as absent and the panel states that no target is set.

5.5 Regional sales distribution

Turnover grouped by the customer's country, taken from the third-party address, and shown as a ranked bar list. A choropleth map was deliberately not used: it would require a bundled vector asset that is dead weight for most installs, it cannot represent a customer base outside the mapped territory, and it is unreadable by assistive technology. The bar list is accurate for any country mix and needs no external asset.

5.6 Account activity overview

The design's page-analytics table, mapped column by column onto ERP data: customer account, acquisition origin, documents issued, revenue and proposal conversion. The table is searchable client-side, and every row links to the customer record and its invoices. A customer with no decided proposal shows an explicit 'n/a' conversion rather than 0 %, which would read as 'never converts'.

5.7 Top countries

Customers invoiced over the period, ranked by turnover, with a flag, a count and the movement against the same period a year earlier. When the earlier period holds no comparable turnover the movement is shown as unknown rather than as a spurious percentage.

 

6. Dhonu Email Interface

Dolibarr stores every e-mail it sends or collects as an agenda event carrying real e-mail columns (sender, recipients, subject, message id). The Dhonu mail workspace is a reading of that store: it is not a mail client and it invents no mailbox. Every row shown is a real communication recorded against a real third party, contact, project or document.

The design's folders have no literal Dolibarr equivalent, so each is an explicit filter over the same store:

Folder	Mapping
Inbox	Incoming messages (collector code, or any non-outgoing row with a sender)
Sent	Outgoing messages that have been sent
Starred	Flagged high priority
Scheduled	Dated in the future
Draft	Outgoing but not yet sent
Important	High priority and still open
Spam / Trash	Not represented in Dolibarr — shown disabled with an explanatory tooltip rather than silently returning an empty list

 

·       Message rows show selection, star, avatar, sender, subject, preview, the linked customer, a real attachment count read from the document index, and the date.

·       Unread messages are heavier as well as differently coloured, so the distinction survives monochrome rendering and colour-blindness.

·       Search covers subject, sender, recipient, label and customer name; results are paginated.

·       Compose, the event list, the calendar and mass emailing all open the corresponding native Dolibarr screens — Dhonu never re-implements sending.

·       Access requires the Dolibarr agenda read permission; a user without the 'all actions' right sees only their own correspondence, exactly as in the native agenda.

·       If the Agenda module is disabled, the page explains why it is empty instead of failing.

 

7. Dhonu Apps Manager

A modern reading of Dolibarr's own module manager. Modules are discovered exactly the way the core admin page discovers them, so native modules, third-party modules and DoliResources extensions all appear.

·       Authorized apps — modules currently enabled, each with a toggle, a status badge, the version and editor, a Disable action and a link to its configuration page.

·       Explore more integrations — modules available but not enabled, with an Enable action and a link to the editor's site. Paginated.

·       Filters by state (all / enabled / available) and origin (core / add-on), plus a search field.

·       A descriptor that fails to load is skipped and traced rather than taking the page down.

An important honesty note, stated on the page itself: 'Enabled' means the module is active in this Dolibarr. It does not assert that a handshake with a remote service succeeded. Enabling and disabling are delegated to the Dolibarr module manager with a CSRF token, so Dhonu never re-implements activation logic and cannot drift from it. The page is restricted to administrators.

 

8. Dhonu Sign In Page

A centred, minimal sign-in screen: the Dhonu mark, a welcome heading, a short instruction, a white card holding the credential fields and the entity selector, a full-width primary button, the password-recovery link and a copyright line.

Authentication is entirely Dolibarr's. Dhonu styles the surroundings of the NATIVE login form and never rebuilds or replaces it, so its fields, its CSRF token, its action and its entity selector are untouched. LDAP, OAuth, SSO, two-factor authentication, account lockout and password recovery therefore continue to behave exactly as configured. No parallel authentication path exists anywhere in the theme.

 

9. Sidebar

A white, full-height rail carrying the brand at its top. Its content is built from the NATIVE Dolibarr menu tree, so every enabled module, every third-party entry, every permission restriction, every entity restriction and every translation is honoured automatically — there is no hardcoded menu to maintain.

·       Grouped sections with small uppercase eyebrows; expandable groups with nested levels.

·       Active entry on a soft blue plate with a primary label AND a primary icon.

·       Live filter field to search the navigation.

·       Collapsible to an icon rail; the state is remembered per user.

·       On phones it becomes an off-canvas drawer with a backdrop.

·       Count and 'New' badges render at the right of a row.

10. Top Bar

·       Global search with a solid primary submit button.

·       Two quick-menu pills leading to bookmarks and the module index.

·       Theme toggle (light/dark), settings, fullscreen.

·       A notification bell whose count is a real figure: agenda actions still open and assigned to the signed-in user. The badge is omitted at zero rather than showing an empty chip.

·       The native Dolibarr login block — entity selector, print, help and the user menu — is preserved and only restyled, so multi-company and the user menu keep working.

·       Modes: light, dark, coloured, transparent, and fixed or static.

11. Global Search

A dedicated results page searching third parties, contacts, products and services, proposals, orders, invoices, projects and agenda events, with the matched term highlighted and a direct link to each record. Results respect the signed-in user's permissions.

12. Charts and Data Visualisation

All Dhonu charts are inline SVG generated server-side. There is no charting library, no CDN request and no client-side data fetch, which keeps pages fast, works under a strict content security policy, and means a chart cannot fail to appear because a script did not load.

·       Combined column-and-line chart with per-series normalisation and hover tooltips.

·       Bubble/scatter chart with area-proportional sizing.

·       Multi-ring radial goal chart. A 0 % arc draws nothing: with a round line cap a zero-length arc would otherwise paint a dot that looks like a real data point.

·       Horizontal bar lists for regional and ranking data.

·       Charts inherit the theme tokens, so they repaint correctly in dark mode.

13. Tables and Lists

Native Dolibarr lists are restyled rather than replaced: uppercase column headers, compact rows, hover feedback, themed badges and pagination. Dhonu's own tables add client-side filtering and row actions. Wide tables scroll inside their own container so a wide table can never force the whole page to scroll sideways.

14. Forms

Text, e-mail, password, number, date, time, select, autocomplete, textarea, checkbox, radio, switch, file upload and monetary fields are restyled consistently: 7-8px radius, hairline border, a visible focus ring in the primary colour, and clear required/error states. Full compatibility with native Dolibarr forms is preserved — no field markup is replaced.

 

15. Theme Configuration

Every facet below is an administrator setting applied on the next page load. Defaults are read from the same table the stylesheet reads, so a reset can never restore a stale palette.

·       Appearance: light, dark or follow-the-system; density compact / normal / comfortable.

·       Palettes: Dhonu Blue (default), Indigo, Green, Turquoise, Orange, Pink, Red, Gray, or a custom primary/accent pair.

·       Sidebar: preset, light, dark, coloured, mini, large or floating; configurable width.

·       Top bar: preset, light, dark, coloured or transparent.

·       Layout: wide, fluid, boxed, compact or comfortable.

·       Cards: radius, shadows, borders and animations can each be switched off.

·       Typography: Inter, Figtree, Poppins, Nunito Sans, Roboto or the system stack; base size.

·       Business options: turnover base (excl./incl. tax), which invoice statuses count, sales and order-intake targets, and whether the native Dolibarr widgets appear under the dashboard.

Widgets: the dashboard embeds Dolibarr's native widget zone, so administrators and users keep the core add / hide / drag-and-drop behaviour, persisted per user by Dolibarr itself.

16. Dark Mode

A true dark mode, not a tinted light mode. The dark surfaces are drawn from an independent cool neutral ramp rather than by darkening the light palette. This matters: a warm accent at low opacity over a navy canvas renders brown, and a green renders olive. Where the light theme uses a tinted tile, the dark theme drops the tile to the card surface and moves the colour into the icon plate, where it stays legible.

Dark mode covers the rail, the top bar, the canvas, cards, widgets, tables, forms, charts, dropdowns, modals, the mail workspace, the application manager and the sign-in screen. It can be toggled from the top bar, set as the default in configuration, or follow the operating-system preference. The user's own choice always wins over the administrator default, and it is applied before first paint so there is no flash of the wrong theme.

17. Responsive Design

Verified at 1600, 1400, 1100, 820 and 390 pixels wide. At 390 px the measured page width equals the viewport on the dashboard, the mail workspace and the application manager — no horizontal overflow.

·       Rail becomes an off-canvas drawer with a backdrop.

·       Top bar simplifies; the wide search and quick menus are withdrawn and remain reachable.

·       KPI grids step from four columns to two to one.

·       Panels stack; wide tables scroll inside their own container.

·       Touch targets stay large enough to hit comfortably.

18. Accessibility

·       Text and interface contrast targeted at WCAG 2.1 AA in both light and dark modes.

·       Status is never conveyed by colour alone — an icon, a label or a weight change accompanies it.

·       Visible focus rings on every interactive control; the theme never removes focus styling.

·       Charts carry a role and an accessible name, and their data is also available as text or a table, so nothing is exclusive to a graphic.

·       The regional panel is a bar list precisely so it can be read by assistive technology.

·       Reduced-motion preference is honoured, and animations can be disabled outright.

19. Performance

·       No charting library, no CDN dependency, no client-side data fetching.

·       One dynamic stylesheet and one dynamic script, both cached; the cache is invalidated automatically on a version change so users get updates without a hard refresh.

·       The script carries a per-user figure, so it is served with a private cache directive and never sits in a shared cache.

·       Charts are server-rendered SVG: no layout thrash, no rendering work on the client.

·       Brand artwork is vector (SVG), a few hundred bytes, and scales to any density.

20. Security

·       No Dolibarr core file is modified. Only official mechanisms are used: module parts, hooks, a menu manager and standard pages.

·       Authentication is entirely native; no parallel authentication path exists.

·       Every page enforces Dolibarr permissions — the mail workspace requires agenda read rights and restricts a limited user to their own correspondence; the application manager is administrator-only.

·       State-changing links carry Dolibarr CSRF tokens, and module enable/disable is delegated to the core module manager.

·       All output is escaped; all query parameters are read through Dolibarr's filtered accessors and validated against whitelists.

·       Configuration values that reach a stylesheet are validated against a strict character whitelist, so a stored setting cannot close a CSS rule and inject arbitrary styling.

·       No secrets, credentials or third-party endpoints are embedded anywhere in the theme.

21. Dolibarr Integration and Compatibility

Dhonu integrates only through supported extension points: module parts for assets, a forced menu manager for the rail, documented hooks for page decoration, and ordinary module pages for its four workspaces.

·       Verified on Dolibarr 17.0.3 with PHP 8.1; declared minimum Dolibarr 16.0, PHP 7.0.

·       Verified alongside 93 modules on the test installation, native and third-party.

·       Multi-entity aware: every query is scoped with Dolibarr's entity helper.

·       Menus, permissions, hooks and third-party modules continue to work untouched.

·       Disabling Dhonu clears only the settings that still point at Dhonu, so removing it can never break another theme that has since taken over the same shared constants.

22. Technical Architecture

A single resolved design token set drives everything. The stylesheet, the scripts, the dashboard, the rail renderer and the configuration screen all read the same resolver, so they cannot drift apart.

Folder structure of the package:

dhonu/

  core/modules/modDhonu.class.php   module descriptor (activation, assets, hooks)

  core/dhonu_presets.php            design tokens and settings resolver

  core/dhonu_dashdata.php           data layer (all SQL, documented mappings)

  core/menus/standard/              rail renderer and forced menu manager

  css/dhonu.css.php                 dynamic stylesheet

  js/dhonu.js.php                   dynamic script

  index.php                         dashboard

  email.php                         mail workspace

  apps.php                          application manager

  search.php                        global search results

  admin/setup.php                   configuration screen

  class/dhonu_demo.class.php        demonstration data generator

  img/                              brand artwork (SVG)

  langs/<7 locales>/dhonu.lang      translations

 

23. Installation

Home > Setup > Modules/Applications > Deploy an external module, upload module_dhonu-1.0.zip, then enable 'Dhonu' in the module list. The theme applies immediately. Configure it from the module's cog icon or from the top bar. To remove it, disable the module; to uninstall, disable it and delete custom/dhonu.

Upgrading: deploy the newer package over the previous one and re-enable the module. Settings are preserved, and the asset cache is invalidated automatically so users receive the new stylesheet on an ordinary reload.

24. Customisation and Translation

Most adjustments need no code: use the configuration screen. To go further, core/dhonu_presets.php is the single source of truth for colours, radius, fonts and chrome variants; changing a token there repaints the whole interface consistently.

All user-visible strings are Dolibarr translation keys, prefixed to avoid collisions with other modules — an unprefixed generic key can otherwise be overwritten by another module's translation and silently display the wrong wording. Seven locales ship complete: English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch and Portuguese. To add one, copy a langs/<locale>/dhonu.lang file and translate the values.

25. Demonstration Data

Dhonu ships a demonstration data generator so a fresh installation shows a populated, coherent interface rather than empty panels: customers spread across several countries (so the regional panels have something to distribute), twelve months of invoices, orders and proposals, payments, and a two-directional mailbox. It runs only on an installation explicitly flagged as a demonstration platform, never on a production database.

26. Verification Performed

The following were executed against a Dolibarr 17.0.3 installation with 93 modules, on PHP 8.1, and are reported as performed:

·       PHP syntax check on every shipped PHP file — no errors.

·       Module activation with post-activation assertions on constants and the forced menu manager.

·       HTTP smoke test over the Dhonu pages and the main native pages: 13/13 pass, each asserted to be a real page (not the login form), free of fatal errors, with a non-empty title, a properly closed document, and no untranslated key leaking into the markup.

·       Translation completeness check across all seven locales — no missing key.

·       Rendered-screenshot review of every workspace in light and dark mode; layout geometry asserted numerically, not by node count.

·       Horizontal-overflow measurement at 390 px on the dashboard, mail workspace and application manager — zero overflow on all three.

·       Field-alignment measurement on the sign-in screen.

·       ZIP structure verification: a single dhonu/ root, no OS metadata, no cache files.

Not performed, and therefore not claimed: testing on Dolibarr 20 or 21 (the available environment runs 17.0.3); testing in Firefox, Safari or Edge (the automated browser available here is Chromium/Chrome); testing on physical Android or iOS devices — mobile verification was done with emulated viewports at device pixel ratio 2. These should be repeated in the target environment before commercial release.

27. Limitations

·       The mail workspace reads what Dolibarr records. An installation that never sends mail through Dolibarr and runs no e-mail collector will show an empty inbox — correctly.

·       Spam and Trash have no Dolibarr equivalent and are shown disabled rather than faked.

·       The application manager reflects module state in this Dolibarr; it does not test connectivity to any external service.

·       The regional panel is a ranked bar list, not a geographic map, for the reasons given in 5.5.

·       Goal percentages need either configured targets or a credible year-ago baseline; otherwise the panel states that no target is set.

28. Future Enhancements

·       Optional choropleth map as an add-on for installations that want one.

·       User-level dashboard composition on top of the existing widget zone.

·       Additional palettes and a saved-preset import/export exchange format.

·       Right-to-left layout validation for Arabic and Hebrew installations.

29. Support and Maintenance

Dhonu is published and maintained by DoliResources. Support requests, upgrade questions and customisation enquiries: https://www.doliresources.com

Copyright © 2026 DoliResources. All rights reserved. The theme is distributed under GPL-3.0-or-later. All code and artwork in this package are original work owned by DoliResources; the reference designs were used solely as a visual brief and no third-party code, logo, photograph, illustration or icon set has been reused.