New in Spress 2.2.0: themes and add-ons manager

Hello everybody. The development of Spress 2.2.0 continues on its way and today I want to show you two new features: the support for themes and a new set of commands aimed to manage Spress's add-ons.

Themes

This version of Spress has a theme system. Typically a theme package layouts, includes (reusable parts of a site) and assets and those can be overridden by the site that are using the theme. Themes (and plugins too) are published via Packagist.org. You will need a Packagist account which you can create for free.

How to create a site based on a theme?

The new:site command has been modified to let you create sites based on themes. With that purpose in mind, the command creates a blank site and sets the theme as a requirement in the composer.json file. The below example creates a site based on the latest development version of Spresso theme 2.1:

$ spress new:site my-site spress/spress-theme-spresso:2.1.*-dev

A site can has multiples themes installed but only one can be active at a time. To add more themes you only need to run a add:plugin command with the theme's name:

$ spress add:plugin my-vendor/theme2

The theme used by a site is defined at name key of the config.yml file:

themes:
  name: 'spress/spress-theme-spresso'

Ever you want to update the themes used by your site only need to perform a update:plugin command:

$ spres update:plugin

Note that at this time, only Spresso theme has been adapted to the new package manager of Spress.

See new feature #98 for more details.

How to create a theme?

In order to simplify things, there is a command for creating themes: new:theme. This one let you create a blank theme or a theme using another pre-existing theme.

The below example will scaffolds a blank theme into my-site folder:

$ spress new:theme my-site

This time we will scaffold a theme based on Spresso into my-site folder:

$ spress new:theme mysite spress/spress-theme-spresso:2.1.*-dev

Add-on manager

Spress 2.2.0 come with a simple package manager based on Composer. Below, a list of new commands that has been added:

• new:theme: Creates a new theme (blank or based on another pre-existent).
• add:plugin: Adds a new plugin or theme and resolves its dependencies.
• remove:plugin: Removes a plugin or theme previously intalled.
• update:plugin: Updates plugins and themes on which your site depend on.

Additionally, new:site command has been modified and the --all option has been declared as deprecated.

See new feature #96 for more details.