Getting Started

Willamette is a foundational starter theme for the Bridgetown framework to help you get a jumpstart on creating a blog, publishing technical documentation, or designing a portfolio.

Installing Willamette can be done by using the automated installer when creating a new Bridgetown site, or manually at any point in a project lifecycle (though it’ll be harder the more you’ve customized layouts, styles, etc. already).

To use the automated installer, first make sure you’ve installed Bridgetown and its prerequisites. Then in your terminal, run the following command:

bridgetown new site_name_here -a https://codeberg.org/bridgetownrb/willamette

This does three things:

1. It creates a new Bridgetown project repository using a default file layout.
2. It runs the bridgetown.automation.rb file from the Willamette repo on Codeberg (a Git forge similar to GitHub) which will install the Willamette gem and NPM package.
3. That in turn runs additional automations to alter files in the projects and add new files so your site is fully set up with Willamette’s default layouts, components, and frontend assets.

At this point, you can cd into your project and run bin/bridgetown start (bin/bt s for short) to spin up the development server and check out Willamette.

There will be a button on the homepage (src/index.md) to view the Willamette Style Guide. Not only does this preview some of Willamette’s typography & content presentation, but it offers a live color picker so you can select your own color hue for the theme (the --wll-color-brand CSS variable).

What’s Next? #

You’ll probably want to start adding some initial content to your site, using that as a jumping off point to direct the further customization of the theme to really make your project your own.

And of course, if you get stuck you can hop into one of the Bridgetown community spaces and ask for assistance or feedback. For specific feature requests or to report bugs, visit the Willamette repo and file an issue.