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Site Templates

A Wikidown wiki publishes as a static website. The pages are always plain markdown; templates decide what the site around them looks like. The same wiki can come out as a documentation site with a sidebar, or as a marketing site with a landing page, its own navigation, and sections built from data files.

Two kinds of site

	Wiki template	Marketing-style templates
Looks like	Docs site: top bar, `.order`-driven sidebar, page body	Anything: hero, cards, listings, pricing, custom nav
Files	`_layouts/wikidown.html`, `_includes/nav-tree.html`, `assets/wikidown.css`	Your own `_layouts/.html`, `_includes/.html`, `assets/`, plus `_data/`
Set up by	Nothing: `export-html` has it built in. `wikidown pages --theme` copies it for editing	You write them; `_config.yml` says which pages use them
Example	wikidown.org's docs pages, this page included	warehousedistrictarthop.com (source)

You don't pick one or the other. A marketing site is usually the wiki template for most pages plus one or two custom layouts: the Art Hop site gives its home page a landing layout and every other page its own restyled wikidown layout. wikidown.org keeps the stock wiki layout and replaces only the root index.html.

How a page is built

The page's markdown is rendered to HTML (Markdig, GitHub-style heading IDs, tables, task lists).
_config.yml picks the page's layout: an entry under wikidown.layouts, or wikidown by default.
The layout is rendered with Liquid. It sees the page as page and {{ content }}, and the whole site as site: every page, the .order nav tree, _config.yml values, and everything in _data/.
If the layout's front matter names another layout, the result is wrapped in that one too.
Static files (images, assets/, .attachments/, CNAME) are copied through unchanged.

Wiki pages never carry front matter, so they stay readable in GitHub, the editor, and to AI agents. Everything about presentation lives in _config.yml, _layouts/, _includes/, and _data/.

Pages in this section

Building a Marketing Site: step by step, from a plain wiki to a landing page with custom nav, sections pulled from wiki pages, and data-driven listings.
Customizing the Theme: edit the stock wiki layout, or replace the root index.html with a hand-written landing page.
Data-Driven Templates: _data/ files, site.pages, wiki_body, per-page layouts, and root_page, with worked examples.
Template Reference: every site and page variable, every filter, the _config.yml keys, and links to the Liquid, Fluid, and Jekyll documentation.

For deployment, see Publishing to GitHub Pages and Publishing to GitLab Pages.