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.

Structure

An Automad theme consists of templates, a theme.json file, CSS files, and possibly JavaScript files, all grouped in a directory under packages. While not required, it's recommended to create a unique directory as your namespace and place your theme inside it, like this:

packages/
  yournamespace/
    yourtheme/
      assets/
      template.php
      page_not_found.php
      composer.json
      theme.json

Templates

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

Block Layouts

Blocks stack vertically by default, but the Block editor allows users to arrange them in grids nested within a section or stretch them to cover the full width of the parent container. The underlying flexbox wrappers are generated automatically by the render engine. However, there are a few things to keep in mind to make everything work properly. Learn more about optimizing and preparing your template markup to fully support all layout features.

404 Pages

You can also add a custom template for 404 error pages. Simply add a template named page_not_found.php to design a custom error page that matches the style of your other templates.