README

A minimal portfolio and blog theme for Kirby CMS. Built for Kirby 5 + PHP 8.2+.

Index is built for easy updates, not elaborate structure. No menu, no case studies, no complex navigation – because in my experience, that's where people get stuck and stop updating their portfolios.

List your work. Write when you want. That's it. The templates are simple to extend if you need more later.

Features

RSS Feed

Built-in RSS feed for your blog. Let readers subscribe and follow your writing without any extra setup.

Sitemap

Automatic XML sitemap generation for search engines. Better indexing out of the box.

Minimal CSS

Tiny CSS footprint. Fast loading, easy to understand, simple to modify. No preprocessors, no frameworks, no complexity.

Adjustable colors (two-color palette)

Pick your primary and accent color. That's it. The constraint keeps your site cohesive and makes customization trivial. Change two variables, done.

Geist font family

Ships with Geist by Vercel — Geist Pixel as the main display font, Geist Sans for body text. Both are licensed under the SIL Open Font License and load fast. Swap them out by overriding the CSS variables.

Two blog listing styles

Choose between an index-style listing grouped by year, or a continuous feed that shows full posts in chronological order. Toggle between them from the Panel.

Breadcrumbs and basic SEO fields

Essential SEO handled for you. Page titles, meta descriptions, breadcrumbs for navigation context. The basics done right.

No build tools

No npm, no build process, no compilation step. Edit templates, refresh browser. That's it. Perfect for quick tweaks and easy deployment.

Extensible via snippet overrides

Drop a header-extra.php snippet into site/snippets/ to inject project-specific <head> content — OG images, analytics, custom meta tags — without touching the theme.

Installation

Requirements

PHP 8.2 or higher (8.3+ recommended)
A web server
Kirby 5 (free for local development; license required for production — see License)
Composer (Track A only — getcomposer.org if you don't have it)

Starting point: Plainkit

Both installation tracks start from Plainkit — Kirby's minimal starter kit. Do not use Starterkit. It ships with templates, blueprints, and sample content that conflict with the theme and are tedious to untangle.

Pick one track and follow it end to end — mixing them causes conflicts.

Track A: Composer

Create a new project from Plainkit:

composer create-project getkirby/plainkit my-site
cd my-site

Add the theme:

composer require eddiedale/index-theme

Remove the conflicting Plainkit files — see the step below.

Track B: ZIP download or Git submodule

Download Plainkit and follow the Kirby quickstart guide to get it running locally. Then come back here.
Install the theme:

Option 1: ZIP download

Download the ZIP from the releases page
Extract it, rename the folder to index-theme if needed, and place it in site/plugins/

Option 2: Git submodule (recommended if your project is a git repo)

git submodule add https://github.com/eddiedale/index-theme.git site/plugins/index-theme

To pull in future theme updates:

git submodule update --remote site/plugins/index-theme

Remove the conflicting Plainkit files — see the step below.

Remove conflicting Plainkit files (both tracks)

Plainkit ships with a few stub files that silently override the theme's versions. Kirby always prefers files in site/ over plugin files, so these need to go.

From the root of your project, run:

rm site/blueprints/site.yml site/blueprints/pages/default.yml site/templates/default.php

These files only exist in a fresh Plainkit — skip any that aren't there.

After this, your structure should look like:

site/
└── plugins/
    └── index-theme/
        ├── index.php
        ├── blueprints/
        ├── templates/
        └── ...

Starter content

The theme ships with a content/ folder with some example content to show how the theme can be used.

Note: Only do this on a fresh install. If you've already added your own content, skip this step — the commands below will delete it.

rm -rf content/                                      # removes files from Plainkit
cp -r site/plugins/index-theme/content/ content/     # copies starter content

Replace it with your own content whenever you're ready.

First run

Navigate to /panel in your browser. You'll be prompted to create an admin account — do that first, then start editing your content from the Panel.

Configuration

The theme registers a few options you can set in site/config/config.php:

`sitemap.ignore`

Pages to exclude from the sitemap. Defaults to ['error'].

return [
    'sitemap.ignore' => ['error', 'drafts'],
];

Customisation

Kirby always checks site/templates/, site/snippets/, and site/blueprints/ before the plugin. To override anything from the theme without modifying it, place a file with the same name in the corresponding site/ folder.

For example, to customise the header, create site/snippets/header.php and Kirby will use that instead of the theme's version.

To inject content into <head> — analytics, OG image tags, custom meta — without touching the header template, create site/snippets/header-extra.php. The theme will automatically include it.

What's Kirby?

Kirby is a file-based CMS for PHP. If you're new to it, the docs and forum are the best places to start.

License

The theme is free and open source under the MIT License. Use it, modify it, ship it — just keep the license and copyright notice.

Kirby CMS is a separate commercial product. It's free to use locally for development, but requires a paid license for production. Purchase one at getkirby.com/buy.

eddiedale / index-theme

Maintainers

Details