Adopting themakR

themakR is the pkgdown template for the CTTIR package suite. It gives every package the same look — the Hugo Coder palette used on the suite site with light and dark modes, Inter body text, JetBrains Mono code, a light/dark/auto toggle, the hex top-left in the navbar, the rotemplate-style navigation and sidebar, and a shared suite footer — with two lines of configuration. This vignette is the complete adoption guide.

1. Declare the website dependency

Add this line to your package’s DESCRIPTION, so the pkgdown GitHub Action installs themakR before building your site:

Config/Needs/website: CTTIR/themakR

2. Point your site at the template

Add this to your package’s _pkgdown.yml:

template:
  package: themakR
development:
  mode: auto

That is the whole theme configuration. Colours and colour modes, fonts, syntax-highlighting themes, the navbar layout (brand far left; Search, Reference, Articles, Changelog, GitHub, and the light switch grouped on the right), and the home sidebar are all inherited from themakR.

3. Provide your hex

Make sure your package has its hex sticker at man/figures/logo.png (an additional man/figures/logo.svg is even better — it stays sharp at any size). The template places it top-left in the navbar automatically and sizes it for you. No configuration needed.

The home page sidebar renders these sections, in order: Links · License · Community · Citation · Developers · R-universe. Each section only appears when its source material exists, so check:

URL and BugReports in DESCRIPTION → Links
LICENSE + LICENSE.md → License
.github/CONTRIBUTING.md (or root CONTRIBUTING.md) → Community
inst/CITATION (must run cleanly through citation()) → Citation
aut/cre in Authors@R, ideally with ORCID → Developers

A missing file simply hides its section — that is expected, not a bug. The R-universe section is shared config and always renders; if your package should not point there, drop it in your own _pkgdown.yml:

home:
  sidebar:
    structure: [links, license, community, citation, authors]

5. Build

# install the template locally first, if you haven't:
# pak::pak("CTTIR/themakR")
pkgdown::build_site()

The light/dark/auto toggle, the house styling, and the footer appear with no further configuration.

Per-package accent override

Each package may keep its own distinct accent (for example, the border colour of its hex) while sharing everything else. Set bslib’s primary in your _pkgdown.yml:

template:
  package: themakR
  bslib:
    primary: "#5E2C8E"   # your package's accent (here: the suite purple)

Your _pkgdown.yml is merged over themakR’s, so this wins for your site only. Links, the active navbar item, focus rings, and blockquote bars follow the new accent automatically; fonts, the toggle, the footer, and the layout stay shared. (Dark-mode link colour stays Hugo Coder blue unless you also override it in CSS — accents that read well on both #fafafa and #212121 work best.)

The footer stamps “<package> is part of the CTTIR suite”. To change the suffix wording for one site:

template:
  package: themakR
  params:
    part_of: "the CTTIR clinical tools"

The value is inserted as-is (plain text or HTML).

What you should not do

Don’t copy themakR’s CSS into your package — override primary (and template.params) instead, so theme fixes reach every site at once.
Don’t add your own light-switch configuration; it is already on.