MDX Layout Components

The ThemeProvider component can be nested within a parent ThemeProvider, allowing you to contextually adjust styles in certain parts of a UI. This functionality can be leveraged to create custom layout components that take MDX content as children to create uniquely styled blocks of content. For example this site's landing page uses this approach to style its content, which is written in MDX.

As an example, create a new component with the ThemeProvider and a wrapping <div>.

/** @jsx jsx */
import { jsx, ThemeProvider } from 'theme-ui'
export default props => (
  <ThemeProvider theme={{}}>
    <div {...props} />
  </ThemeProvider>
)

To add styles to this component, add a theme prop to the ThemeProvider and an sx prop to the div.

/** @jsx jsx */
import { jsx, ThemeProvider } from 'theme-ui'
export default props => (
  <ThemeProvider
    theme={{
      styles: {
        // style child elements
        h1: {
          fontSize: [5, 6, 7],
        },
      },
    }}>
    <div
      {...props}
      sx={{
        // swap colors for an inverted effect
        color: 'background',
        bg: 'primary',
        px: 3,
        py: 4,
      }}
    />
  </ThemeProvider>
)

The component above can then be imported and used within an MDX document.

<!-- example mdx file -->
import MyLayout from './MyLayout'
<MyLayout>
# Hello
This section has custom styles
</MyLayout>
This part of the document uses default styles