Developer Guide
Extensibility is one of the most important features of any software. Basically there are two types of packages to extend the functionality of Automad: themes and extensions. While Automad's template language allows beginners to develop their own themes, it is also possible to use plain PHP to develop extensions of any complexity.
It is recommended to disable caching during development!
Theme Development
Depending on how deep you want to dive into the development of themes for Automad, you can choose between the following guides below.
Theme Skeleton
To get started right away with developing your own theme, please check out the theme skeleton. It is a good and simple example for a basic file structure, how snippets for navbars and menus are implemented and what are the other essential parts of the Automad template language. Please also take a look at the included README file.
In-Depth Guide
In case you want to learn about all the features of the template language and how theme packages work, check out the building themes guide.
Cheat Sheets
To get started quickly without reading the full documentation, you can find a collection of the most common snippets, function calls and tricks in the cheat sheets.
Extensions
Aside from themes, extension are building the second group of Automad packages and allow for extending the feature set that can be used in templates. Extensions are not more than little PHP classes that can be called in templates in several ways.
Share Your Creation
When you are done with the development of a theme or an extension, don't hesitate to make your creation public and share it with others. Follow this guide for more information about publishing packages.
Editor Plugins
Note that there are plugins available for some common text editors to help you developing themes for Automad.