This is the tutorials track of the Developer Guide. Six chapters, each adding exactly one new surface to a real theme, so by the end of the last chapter you have a working theme you can install on any Scriptor site, not a pile of disconnected snippets.
The Concepts chapters explained how Scriptor works. This track shows how to build on top of it. If you have not read the Concepts yet, you can still follow along, since every chapter cross-links the relevant concept where it gets used.
The mini-case: Atelier
You'll build a theme called atelier. Imagine you are a freelance
designer or developer and want a small, fast personal site:
- a Home showcase page,
- an About page,
- a Projects gallery driven from the page tree (each project is a Scriptor page with images),
- a Blog living outside the page tree as markdown files,
- a Contact form,
- and a custom 404.
That is the artefact. Each chapter takes it one step further; you can stop at any chapter and the theme still runs.
Chapters
| # | Chapter | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Welcome | Meet the mini-case, see the target sitemap, agree on what we are not building |
| 2 | Skeleton | composer.json, template.php, the minimum a theme needs to render "Hello, Atelier" |
| 3 | Page Templates | One template per page-type: home.php, basic.php, contact.php, projects.php |
| 4 | Layouts, Assets & Navigation | header.php / footer.php partials, the resources/ asset pipeline, a top-nav that merges DB pages with plugin contributions |
| 5 | Blog via Plugin | Add the bigins/scriptor-markdown-pages plugin, hang a content/blog/ tree off the theme, render listing + single-post |
| 6 | Forms, Errors & Publishing | Contact-form pattern, a custom 404.php, and packaging Atelier as a versioned Composer package |
What you will not find in this track
- Class-by-class reference. That lives in the API Reference track. Tutorials cite class names; they do not enumerate every method on them.
- Asset-build pipelines. Atelier ships hand-written CSS. No Vite, no Tailwind, no PostCSS. That keeps the focus on the Scriptor surface; nothing here stops you from bolting your favourite build tool on top.
- Multi-language support. Atelier is single-language. The Cookbook covers i18n separately.
What you need before chapter 1
- A working Scriptor install, reachable on
http://localhost:<port>/with at least one page in the page tree. Thedocs/install.mdwalkthrough covers the three steps (git clone,composer install,php bin/scriptor install) and the admin-password handling. - PHP 8.2+ and Composer 2 on your machine.
- A text editor. Anything that highlights PHP is plenty.
If / serves a page and you can log in at /editor/, you are
ready. Open chapter 1.
This page is markdown at
scriptor-cms-site/theme/themes/info/content/developer-guide/build-a-theme/_index.md,
rendered by the bigins/scriptor-markdown-pages plugin via the
/developer-guide/build-a-theme/ URL.
