Who this is for. Everyone finishing this guide. After this page you will know which guides to read next, in what order, and which you can leave until a ticket needs them.
Three are required
- Guide 1, Choosing how to build, because it decides where pages are composed: on the platform, in your own application, or a mix. Everything else depends on that choice, and it is expensive to change once work has started.
- Guide 2, Template languages: Smarty and Twig, because every template you write runs in one of the two engines, under the platform's rules for each, and those rules are where copied code most often fails.
- Guide 4, Input types, layouts, components and images, because layouts are the platform's central idea: every other guide assumes you know how an input type, a layout area, a layout and a component fit together.
All twelve
| Guide | Who it is for | Read it when |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Choosing how to build | Whoever decides the shape of a build | Before committing to server-rendered, headless or hybrid. Required |
| 2. Template languages: Smarty and Twig | Theme developers | Before writing templates. Required |
| 3. The theme repo and the asset pipeline | Theme and JavaScript developers | When you change the build, the styles, the scripts or the page shell |
| 4. Input types, layouts, components and images | Theme developers and content modellers | Before modelling any content. Required |
| 5. Content types and custom entities | Content modellers | When choosing between pages, blog posts, books and custom entities, and for URLs, SEO and publishing |
| 6. The APIs: REST, GraphQL and custom endpoints | JavaScript developers, integrations engineers, headless builds | When code reads or writes content |
| 7. Members, accounts and gated content | Sites where visitors sign in | Before building sign-in, a member area or restricted content |
| 8. Commerce | Commerce implementers | From the catalogue to a paid order |
| 9. Automation, jobs and integration | Integrations engineers | For emails, schedules and other systems; jobs were called hooks |
| 10. Forms and data capture | Anyone building a form | Before the first form, and before submitting one from code |
| 11. Search, filtering and faceted navigation | Theme developers | For a search page, filters or a faceted listing |
| 12. Performance, caching, deployment and go-live | Site operators, and anyone shipping | Before launch, and whenever a page is slow |
The guides are written for people who hold two or three of these roles at once; theme developer and content modeller is the common pairing on a site build, which is why Guides 2 and 4 come so early.
Beside the guides
- How-to library: one task each, start to finish.
- Troubleshooting: answers grouped by symptom.
- API reference: every endpoint, with a working example.
- Reference: models, routes, default templates and classes, generated from the platform.
Finding your way around these docs explains when to reach for which.