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.
Built-in RSS feed for your blog. Let readers subscribe and follow your writing without any extra setup.
Automatic XML sitemap generation for search engines. Better indexing out of the box.
Tiny CSS footprint. Fast loading, easy to understand, simple to modify. No preprocessors, no frameworks, no complexity.
Pick your primary and accent color. That's it. The constraint keeps your site cohesive and makes customization trivial. Change two variables, done.
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.
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.
Essential SEO handled for you. Page titles, meta descriptions, breadcrumbs for navigation context. The basics done right.
No npm, no build process, no compilation step. Edit templates, refresh browser. That's it. Perfect for quick tweaks and easy deployment.
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.
- 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)
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.
- 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.
-
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-themeif needed, and place it insite/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-themeTo pull in future theme updates:
git submodule update --remote site/plugins/index-theme- Remove the conflicting Plainkit files — see the step below.
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.phpThese 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/
└── ...
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 contentReplace it with your own content whenever you're ready.
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.
The theme registers a few options you can set in site/config/config.php:
Pages to exclude from the sitemap. Defaults to ['error'].
return [
'sitemap.ignore' => ['error', 'drafts'],
];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.
Kirby is a file-based CMS for PHP. If you're new to it, the docs and forum are the best places to start.
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.