Dawn (package Renick.Dawn) is a modern, minimalist showcase theme for the Renick.Content block editor on OctoberCMS. It puts every block through its paces across real marketing pages and a Tailor-powered blog, on Bootstrap 5, with an autumnal palette. The frontend is branded simply Dawn.

License: Dawn (this theme) is MIT licensed. The Renick.Content plugin is licensed separately and is not covered by this MIT license.

What it demonstrates

• The whole block catalog rendered through the renickContent component: heading, richtext, image, gallery, video, slider, cta, card, card-grid, accordion, timeline, map, pdf, quote, button, section, grid/column, spacer, anchor, testimonials, form/form-field, download and info-banner.
• Six theme-supplied custom blocks in content-blocks/ — hero, hero-numbers, features, pricing-table, data-table and blog-slider — registered automatically by the plugin's theme discovery and offered in the editor's "Dawn" picker group.
• Bootstrap 5 + block CSS/JS injected automatically by the component's asset combiner — the theme ships no CDN links.
• A blog with no external plugin, modelled purely with Tailor blueprints. Posts store their body in a contenteditor field and render it with the block renderer. Overview page has tag filtering and pagination.
• Multisite i18n — one theme across per-locale sites with a language-picker dropdown, hreflang alternates, and localized page titles/descriptions. The reference install ships English (primary) + German; Spanish translations are included and one blueprint/site away.
• SEO — per-page title, meta description, canonical, Open Graph, Twitter Card, hreflang, and JSON-LD (WebSite site-wide, BlogPosting on posts).
• Responsive + tasteful motion — gradient hero, subtle scroll reveals and float, all gated behind prefers-reduced-motion. No horizontal overflow from 390px up.
• Turbo View Transitions — same-origin navigations cross-fade via October's Turbo router (v4.3+); browsers without the View Transitions API degrade to an instant swap. Controlled by the Page view transitions theme customize setting (on by default; set it off to fall back to plain page loads).
• Mobile off-canvas menu — below the navbar breakpoint the nav slides in as an off-canvas panel with a backdrop, a close button and full keyboard/aria-expanded support, built without the Bootstrap Offcanvas JS so it stays Turbo-safe.
• Optional mega menu — the per-site Dawn\Menu global switches the header between the automatic page-tree nav and a freely composed mega menu (balloon selector; the form changes with the mode). First-level entries are repeater groups: a page link (page finder: Dawn\Page entries, blog posts, CMS pages or free URLs — site-aware resolution) or a category — deliberately not a link — whose full-width disclosure panel (W3C APG pattern: chevron button, aria-expanded, Escape returns focus) pairs the sub-links with an optional hero content card (image, formatted text, button; left/right side configurable per item). Every entry and sub-link can carry an optional Lucide icon, picked with Renick.Content's reusable rciconpicker backend widget (~1,700 sprite icons, searchable) and rendered via the now-global rc_icon() markup function (|raw). On mobile the panel folds into the off-canvas as an accordion with links and card stacked.

Pages

Imprint and privacy pages are seeded too (hidden from the nav). German is served at /de/...; Spanish UI translations are included and a dawn_es site is one site row away.

Install & activate (local dev)

Install Dawn from the OctoberCMS Marketplace like any other theme (Settings → Front-end theme, or php artisan theme:install dawn), then activate it. From the project root, seed the demo content with October's native theme seeder:

php artisan theme:seed dawn

This imports the five Tailor blueprints into app/blueprints/dawn/ and migrates them, pulls in the demo media (photos + PDF), and creates the EN/DE marketing pages + blog with their multisite counterparts pre-linked (no tailor:propagate needed). The seed is idempotent — re-running theme:seed updates records in place rather than duplicating them.

Contributors working in this repo instead of a marketplace install should use the internal reset skill under .claude/skills/reset-testserver/ to stand up a clean local EN/DE dev/test install in one command.

Multisite

Per-locale System\Models\SiteDefinition rows drive the languages, all bound to this theme. The reference install ships two:

Spanish UI strings ship in translate/es.yaml — adding a dawn_es site at /es lights the third locale up without further theme work.

The layout (layouts/default.htm) builds the language-picker dropdown and hreflang alternates from the enabled sites that share this theme, de-duplicated to one entry per locale. UI strings use the {{ 'key'|_ }} filter (RainLab.Translate); translations live in translate/*.yaml and are imported with php artisan translate:scan. The Dawn\BlogPost blueprint uses multisite: all, so one entry is shared across every site with independently editable per-site values — theme:seed imports the EN and DE copies pre-linked (no tailor:propagate needed).

Blueprints (Tailor)

Five blueprints ship under seeds/blueprints/ and are copied to app/blueprints/dawn/ + migrated by theme:seed (see seeds/README.md):

• Dawn\BlogTag — type: entry
• Dawn\BlogCategory — type: structure
• Dawn\BlogPost — type: stream, drafts on, with excerpt, cover (mediafinder), content (contenteditor), category/tags relations, and meta_title/meta_description.
• Dawn\Page — the block-composed marketing pages (contenteditor body plus nav/footer/SEO fields).
• Dawn\Theme — a type: global settings record (brand, blog layout, footer) editable under the backend's Theme menu.
• Dawn\Menu — a type: global per-site menu record (normal page-tree nav vs. composed mega menu with page-finder links, nested repeater).

The single-post page renders the stored document with {% component 'renickContent' document=post.content %}, which also injects the block CSS/JS. The overview paginates with ->paginate(6) and preserves the ?tag= filter across pages.

Static Pages

layouts/static.htm declares the staticPage component, so it is selectable by RainLab.Pages. Enable the block editor for static pages via Settings → Content Editor → Integrations → “Use the block editor for Static Pages” and create a page with empty markup to compose it with blocks — the same document renders through this theme's chrome. The static layout ships the same Turbo View Transitions wiring as the default layout.

Structure

themes/dawn/
├── theme.yaml, version.yaml
├── assets/css/theme.css      # theme layer: autumn palette, motion, components
├── assets/js/theme.js        # off-canvas mobile nav, language dropdown, scroll reveal
├── assets/images/dawn/       # credited Unsplash demo photos (see CREDITS.md)
├── assets/files/             # research-paper.pdf (blog PDF demo)
├── layouts/
│   ├── default.htm           # full chrome + SEO head + block assets
│   └── static.htm            # RainLab.Pages-compatible layout
├── partials/
│   ├── seo/head.htm          # title, OG, Twitter, canonical, hreflang, JSON-LD
│   └── site/{header,footer,page-render,page-seo}.htm
├── pages/                    # index, page (Dawn\Page renderer), blog, blog-post, 404
├── content-blocks/           # theme-supplied blocks: hero, hero-numbers, features, pricing-table, data-table, blog-slider
├── lang/                     # backend blueprint labels (en/de.json)
├── translate/                # frontend UI strings for RainLab.Translate (en/de/es.yaml)
├── skills/                   # create-child-theme Claude skill
└── seeds/                    # October-native theme seed: data.yaml + data/*.json, blueprints/, media/

Build a child theme

Dawn ships a Claude skill, skills/create-child-theme/, that scaffolds a new OctoberCMS child theme inheriting from Dawn (theme.yaml parent: dawn) and overriding only a colour scheme, corner style, page set, optional blog and font — everything it doesn't override falls back to Dawn. The skill travels with the theme; a thin pointer under .claude/skills/create-child-theme/ makes it discoverable in Claude Code. Ask for "a Dawn child theme" (or run /create-child-theme) to use it.