Manual frontmatter in skeletons

I am just checking out Grav CMS. I have been reading the documentation and have played around with a few of the skeleton packages. So far I am impressed with the features and ease of use.

What I found a little bit confusing however is that most of the skeletons seem to rely on manual configuration of content in frontmatter to fill / arrange their content.

Coming from a Drupal background this feels a bit weird to me.
Especially since it wouldn't be too difficult to have nice and clean form interface for the same functionality via blueprints?

So maybe I am missing the point?
Are there some limitattions to the whole form / blueprint approach I am not seeing yet? Or is there an other reason these skeletons aren't using forms to edit the content? It would seem to me that for the average website editor this would be a bit too complicated?

Just curious, so it would be nice to hear some feedback!

Hi Kevin,

I too, recall I was a bit confused about that. Some grav theme's author like to use their theme in expert mode, and thus don't create the blueprints whereas some others like to create the blueprint. I know I create blueprints, even for my personal website.

The main problem when theme does not provide blueprint, is that we have to check the template code in order to know which variable to add to the frontmatter.

That said, and as all theme are available on github, you can definitely make a pull request and add the blueprints, or request for a blueprint to be added on the repo, or ask on slack if someone can do it.

Hope it helps,

Paul

Hi Paul,

Thanks for your reply, that is certainly helpful!
Good to know that there don't seem to be any technical limitations behind the reason not to build blueprints.
I agree with you, if you have to look into the templates to see how content should structured, for me, it kind of beats the purpose of having a CMS.
Maybe I'll try adding some blueprints to existing themes (and making them available to the authors) as I dive more into grav!

Hi @K3vin, I use a lot of custom blueprints with my Open Course Hub skeleton if more examples might be of help https://getgrav.org/downloads/skeletons https://github.com/hibbitts-design/grav-theme-course-hub-bootstrap

Maybe you could open an issue in a grav repo, or make a list of theme you would like to be updated with blueprints here on discourse.