Matching a Skeleton Demo - Grayscale

Hello,
I am a longtime, advanced Joomla! user that recently decided to try the Grav CMS. I grabbed a copy of MAMP, installed the core and admin plugin, and added a theme to begin testing. Everything went smoothly enough until I attempted to activate a new theme. I wasn’t surprised that I received a warning - I assumed it was similar to changing your template in Joomla!, but I am fumbling through mirroring the demo and wanted to share my trial and error process in hopes of gaining more insight.

  • Downloading the theme from the repository includes all the files required to duplicate the Demo, adding the theme through the admin plugin does not. For example, I am testing Grayscale and the full download includes the page files from the demo. If I add the theme from the admin panel I do not get those page files. So, my assumption is that the full download includes a stand-alone copy of the Grav core? I was able to mimic the Grayscale demo by removing the Home and Typography pages from the default theme and adding the pages from the Grayscale (modular pages) download. Next I replaced the default site.yaml and system.yaml with the files from the Grayscale download. And…it would appear there is more to replace to duplicate the layout, but I am close.

After some review I suppose the best way to duplicate the Grayscale theme demo would be to simply add the admin plugin to the Grayscale template after installing it?

I am still working through the documentation and have a solid foundation in HTML and CSS, but I have never used Markdown or Twig!!

Thank you for any insight you can provide!
John