Editor Support

Development

Automad templates use their own syntax that is mixed with HTML and PHP. In order to make the development of themes more efficient, it is recommended to install an Automad plugin for your preferred code editor. Such plugins add syntax highlighting for the template language and, depending on the editor, snippets for autocompletion. The following editors are officially supported.

Visual Studio Code

There is an official Automad Template Language extension in the Visual Studio Marketplace. Search for Automad Template Language in the extensions panel of Visual Studio Code in order to install it. The extension provides syntax highlighting as well as snippets for the most common statements, such as comments, loops, conditionals and with statements.

Neovim

For Neovim, there is an official tree-sitter grammar that can be used together with nvim-treesitter. Setting it up basically requires three steps:

  1. Register the automad parser in the parser configuration of nvim-treesitter.
  2. Add automad together with html and php to the list of installed parsers.
  3. Copy the highlighting queries of the grammar into the after/queries directory of your Neovim configuration.

Please follow the instructions in the readme of the repository for the exact configuration. You can also check out this blog post for additional tips on setting up Neovim for Automad theme development.

Starter Kit

Besides editor support, the Starter Kit provides a complete development environment including a local development server, a file watcher and a build setup based on esbuild with support for TypeScript and Less. Use npm run dev to start developing and npm run build to create a production build of your theme.

Packages Recipes
Developer Guide
Extensibility is one of the most important features of any software. Automad can be extended through two main types of packages: themes and extensions. Automad's template language makes it accessible for beginners to develop custom themes, while PHP can be used to create extensions of any complexity.
Themes
Themes are an essential part of any content management system. They define how your content is presented to your website's visitors. Automad's flexible and intuitive template language makes it easy for inexperienced developers and beginners to create themes and templates. If you're an experienced PHP developer who needs more advanced features, you can also develop templates using plain PHP.
theme.json
Every theme needs a theme.json file. All subdirectories of the packages directory that contain a theme.json file side by side with at least one template are considered valid themes. Besides some basic meta data, the theme.json file controls how the fields of your theme are presented in the dashboard.
Template Language
Automad's template language provides a flexible and safe way to render content dynamically. In contrast to generic template engines, Automad's core features are integrated directly into the engine. That includes things like image processing, collections of pages and files, as well as access to an even wider range of functionality through custom functions and extensions. Due to its close relation to the core, the syntax is clean and intuitive and reduces overhead to a minimum.
Layout Settings
Aside from just stacking blocks on top of each other, the block editor provides powerful features to create flexible layouts directly in the dashboard. Blocks can be stretched to the full width of their parent container and arranged in grids using Layout Sections. While the heavy lifting is done by the render engine in the background, templates and their styles have to be prepared in order to make layouts work as expected.