Moving from X3 to Paper Lantern can be jarring. The clean white interface, the consistent margins and spacings, and the new flat application icons stand in stark contrast to X3.


With the upcoming 11.48 release, cPanel is introducing the Retro style for Paper Lantern. The Retro style makes Paper Lantern look like X3 so that if you prefer the old and trusted appearance of X3, you can feel at home even when using Paper Lantern.  It’s not a perfect implementation of X3, but with the silver chrome borders, blue-teal gradients, electro-blue world map page headers, and bubbly application icons, Paper Lantern can have the same familiarity that so many of our customers crave.

Paper Lantern's Retro Style

Switch to the Retro Style

If you’re a cPanel user and want the Retro style:

  1. Login to your cPanel account and click the User Preferences pulldown menu from the top navigation.
  2. Choose Change Style.
  3. Click the Apply button next to the Retro style in the list. Your browser will refresh and your cPanel dashboard is now Retro.

The style preference for that account will be saved and the next time that the user logs in, they will see the Retro style.

To assign the style of a cPanel account from the command line:

  1. Create /home/username/var/cpanel/styled in the cpanel user’s home directory if it doesn’t already exist
  2. Create a symlink called current_style and point it to /usr/local/cpanel/base/frontend/paper_lantern/styled/retro:ln -s /usr/local/cpanel/base/frontend/paper_lantern/styled/retro current_style

Switch all cPanel accounts controlled by one Reseller to the Retro style

  1. As a reseller, log into cPanel and click the User Preferences pulldown menu in the top navigation.
  2. Choose Change Style.
  3. Click the Choose Default button below the Retro style.

To assign the Retro style as the default style for all accounts controlled by a Reseller:

  1. As a reseller, SSH into your account.
  2. Create ~/var/cpanel/reseller/styled in your home directory if it doesn’t already exist.
  3. Change into that directory
  4. Create a symlink called default_style and point it to /usr/local/cpanel/base/frontend/paper_lanter/styled/retroln -s /usr/local/cpanel/base/frontend/paper_lantern/styled/retro default_style

Set the default style for all users on the box to the Retro style

  1. SSH into your server and become root.
  2. Create /var/cpanel/customizations/styled from the root directory if it doesn’t already exist.
  3. Change into that directory
  4. Create a symlink called current_style and point it to /usr/local/cpanel/base/frontend/paper_lantern/styled/retroln -s /usr/local/cpanel/base/frontend/paper_lantern/styled/retro default_style

All users who do not already have a current style set will now see the Retro style when they login.