The worst part of coming up with a new CMS/static site generator is that we have no themes. Even when we manage to come up with a theming system (that let’s people write their own layouts then somehow grab those layouts instead of the default layouts to render the final site), we still have one or two themes while Jekyll has a thousand.

If you’re writing a CMS or a static website generator and you want to quickly support a growing variety of themes without burdening yourself or your users with the task of distributing, finding, fetching and managing HTML files and template files, not to mention the task of writing or porting templates of other blog/website engines to your own custom CMS, you came to the right place.

To automatically support all Classless themes on your CMS, you just have to

1. Make the part of your code that renders HTML produce an structure like this.

2. Let your users choose a theme on the theme gallery and include the URL given there on their page.

3. That’s it.

The structure you have to implement may look intimidating at first, but it is the simplest standard ever imagined.

• Basically, Classless themes support 2 kinds of pages:

  • Article pages

    • These are the pages in which you have, inside the <main> tag, an article tag, with a <header> and a <div> for the article body.

  • List pages

    • These are the pages in which you have, inside the <main> tag, a <section> with a <ul> inside. Each of the <li> there should have a <article>. The structure of that <article> is the same as of a standalone <article>, but sometimes you will not want it to have a text content, only the headers, sometimes you will not want the headers to have <img>s and so on.

    • List pages also support a <footer> as a child of <main> for pagination. The basic structure is footer > nav > ul > li > a, that last <a> affording either a \[rel="next"\] or \[rel="prev"\] for custom theme styling.

  • Or you can mix both by just having a main > section > ul and a main > article along each other.