Most CMS products sell you a look. You pick a theme, then spend a week fighting its opinions: the wrong type scale, a hero you cannot delete, a grid that almost matches the mockup.
Forma does not do that. There is no theme store. The public site is whatever HTML and CSS you put in Pages and Snippets. The admin is Forma. The front is yours.
That is the whole pitch for designers: give Forma a design, do not ask it for one.
What you actually ship
A Forma page can be a complete HTML document — <!DOCTYPE html> through </html> — with its own fonts, CSS, and structure. Or it can be a fragment. This marketing site is full documents that include shared chrome:
[[site-head]]
[[site-header]]
…your unique layout…
[[site-footer]]site-head holds tokens and fonts. site-header and site-footer are the repeating shell. Everything between them is the page. That is a website, not a theme override file.
Start with the design, not the CMS
Bring whatever you already have:
- a Figma frame
- a static folder of HTML/CSS
- a pencil sketch with type sizes written in the margin
Decide the tokens first: background, text, muted, stroke, brand gold or brand whatever. Put them on :root in site-head. Then build one page that looks right in a browser. Only then split the repeating pieces into snippets.
Forma will not invent a card component for you. It will store the card you wrote and reuse it when you say so.
What Forma adds after the design is in
Once the markup is yours, the CMS work is boring in the good way:
- slugs and META / SEO fields
- Markdown posts that sit inside your article template
- a featured image that your cover CSS already knows how to crop
- HTML cache writing real files of the design you already approved
You are not “configuring a theme.” You are publishing a site.
If you want the long version of the reusable-piece workflow, read Snippets and Twig. If you want the first page checklist, read Your first Forma page.