Themes

Themes are plugins you can add to your Bridgetown website which may provide layouts, content, components, and frontend assets, as well as perform other tasks to enhance the functionality of your site.

You install a theme the same way you’d install any plugin, either by running a command such as:

bundle add really-cool-theme

and adding init :"really-cool-theme" to your initializers file, or by applying an automation:

bin/bridgetown apply https://github.com/super-great-themes/theme-one

The theme creator will typically provide instructions on how to use the provided theme files and enhancements. Perhaps you’ll use some stylesheets or JavaScript modules provided by the theme. Perhaps the theme will include components such as navbars or slideshows or ways to display new content types you can add to your site templates. Or perhaps the theme will come with layouts you can assign to your content such as posts or collection documents.

Sometimes you might want to copy files out of a theme and into your site repo directly. The bridgetown plugins cd command will help you do exactly that.

Creating a Theme #

To design a theme to distribute to others, create a standard gem-based plugin using the bridgetown plugins new NAME command. Follow that link for more on live testing strategies and how to release and publish your theme.

You’ll need to use a Source Manifest to instruct the Bridgetown build process where to find your theme files.

To provide frontend assets via esbuild, follow these instructions.

To aid your users in installing your plugin and setting up configuration options and so forth, add a bridgetown.automation.rb automation script to your theme repo.

Our Willamette theme can help provide you a leg up…we’re more than happy if you base parts of your new theme on how Willamette sets up things!

And as always, if you have any questions or need support in creating your theme, check out our community resources.

Automations