How Basker works
A high-level look at the layers that make up a Basker site — content, themes, apps, and the platform underneath
A Basker site has four layers, each with a clear job. Understanding what each layer does — and what it doesn't — makes it easier to know where to make a change, where to look when something's wrong, and how the parts fit together.
The four layers
1. Your content
The records you create in the editor — pages, events, performances, posts, people, venues, and so on. Content is the source of truth for everything visible on your site.
Content is structured. A page isn't free-form; it has a title, slug, parent, blocks, SEO, and a position in the page tree. An event isn't free-form either; it has dates, performances, a venue, and connected people. This structure is what makes content searchable, sortable, and translatable across languages.
Content is independent of your theme. The same records can be rendered by different themes; switching themes doesn't change what's stored.
2. Your theme
The theme decides how content becomes the live site visitors see. It defines:
- Templates — the structural arrangement of each kind of page.
- Blocks — the building units editors compose pages from.
- Layouts — the outer shells (header, footer, navigation) that wrap pages.
- Theme settings — the global controls (colours, fonts, navigation behaviour) editors configure.
Most Basker customers run a custom theme built specifically for them. The theme is the single biggest determinant of what your site looks like and what blocks editors can use. See Customising Basker.
3. Apps and integrations
Apps connect Basker to systems outside it — ticketing platforms, digital asset managers, donor and CRM tools. When an app is installed it can:
- Add fields to existing content types.
- Add pickers and sync actions to the editor.
- Provide widgets and components your theme can use on the live site.
Apps are how Basker stays open. Rather than baking every ticketing or CRM integration into the core, the platform provides a clean integration layer that apps plug into. See Apps & integrations.
4. The platform
Underneath everything is the Basker platform itself — the editor, the public site rendering, the search, the CDN, the API, the security and audit layer. Most of the time you don't think about the platform; you work in the editor and on the live site, and the platform makes both work.
The platform is also what handles invariants you don't want to manage yourself: serving every URL with HTTPS, generating SEO metadata, redirecting moved content, scaling to traffic, archiving versioned history.
How a request flows through the layers
When a visitor opens your site, the layers work together:
- The platform receives the request and identifies which site and which URL.
- The platform looks up the content for that URL.
- The platform passes the content to the theme.
- The theme renders the content using its templates, blocks, and layouts.
- Where the theme uses app widgets (booking buttons, account flows), apps add their behaviour.
- The platform serves the resulting page through the CDN.
When you edit a record, the equivalent flow runs in reverse: you save in the editor, the platform stores and versions the change, the live site picks it up, and the next visitor sees the updated content.