Recipes

The recipes below provide a collection of ready-to-use code snippets for common tasks. They can be used as a quick reference while developing themes and extensions.

Recipe	Description
Useful Template Snippets	Common tasks using the template language, like default values, page previews, loops and navigations.
Plain PHP Snippets	Common tasks using plain PHP in templates, custom functions and extensions.

Editor Support Useful Template Snippets

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 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.

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.