Templates

Templates are the individual design files behind a theme, written in Liquid — a safe, well-known templating language. Most people never touch templates: themes and color settings cover the vast majority of needs. When you want precise control over structure or markup, templates are the escape hatch.

What templates are

A theme is made of templates such as:

  • layout/theme.liquid — the page wrapper.

  • templates/index.liquid, templates/page.liquid — the home and generic page layouts.

  • templates/blog.liquid, templates/blog-post.liquid — the blog index and article.

  • templates/docs.liquid, templates/doc.liquid — the docs index and a doc page.

  • sections/header.liquid, sections/footer.liquid — reusable chrome.

You can override any one of these for your site without changing the rest of the theme. Override the footer, keep everything else; delete your override to fall back to the theme default.

Liquid in brief

Liquid renders your live content into HTML at request time. It offers:

  • Filters that transform values — formatting dates, turning rich text into HTML, generating slugs, formatting currency, resizing images, and more.

  • Tags for structure and for dropping in dynamic pieces — including a {% component %} tag to render a reusable component, and {% form %} / {% booking %} tags to embed a form or a booking widget directly in a page.

You do not need to learn Liquid to use SpiderPublish. It is there when you need it.

Editing templates

Go to Design → Templates to see your site's templates, edit one, and preview the result with sample data before saving. Templates are part of your site, so a deploy is what pushes a template change live.

With the CLI or an agent

  • CLI — spideriq templates list, spideriq templates get <path>, and spideriq templates set <path> <file>.

  • MCP / agents — template_list, template_get, template_upsert, template_delete, plus template_preview to render with data and template_get_config / template_update_config for theme configuration.

Tips

  • Override the smallest piece. Change one template, not the whole theme, so future theme updates still benefit you.

  • Preview before you deploy. The preview renders your template against real-shaped data and catches mistakes early.

  • Keep custom edits documented. Note why you overrode a template so a future you (or your agent) understands it.

Next steps