Building Themes

Themes are an essential part of a content management system. They define the way your content is presented to the visitors of your website. Automad's flexible and intuitive template language enables also inexperienced developers or beginners to create themes and templates on their own. In case you are an experienced PHP developer and you need more unusual features, you can also develop templates using plain PHP.

Check out the Tutorial theme to get started!

Structure

An Automad theme is actually not more than a bunch of templates, a theme.json file, some CSS files and possibly some Javascript files, grouped within a directory under packages. While it is not required, it is recommended to create a unique directory as your namespace and place your theme in there as shown here:

packages/
    yournamespace/
        yourtheme/
            css/
            js/
            template.php
            page_not_found.php
            theme.json

Note that all custom modifications to the Standard and the Tutorial packages get lost when updating Automad. Please copy themes to your own namespace (subdirectory), in case you want to keep any custom modifications on updates.

Templates

A template file is a simple .php file containing HTML markup mixed with some template language code to render your content dynamically. While PHP is actually not required within the template file, the .php extension must be used to identify a template.

Before you start to develop your own themes, take a look at the plugins page to install Automad syntax highlighting and snippets for your favorite IDE or editor.

404

There is also the option to add a custom template for a 404 page. Simply add a template with the name page_not_found.php to design a custom error page matching the other templates of your theme.