Read the NationBuilder theme documentation, explore our liquid object reference guide and liquid examples to understand what is possible. Our Website HOWTOs will also be a helpful reference guide.

To become a certified NationBuilder Architect, you will need to create a great looking and modern website design - either as a live site for a client or within your NationBuilder sandbox - that both demonstrates your proficiency with our theming system, as well as the level of designs you are capable of creating for our customers.

Your theme must abide by the following requirements:

• The website design should look heavily customized and not too similar to the official public themes. View examples.
• Start with the "Bootstrap" framework when creating a new theme. This is the boilerplate framework which NationBuilder themes are built on.
• Do not strip the contents of theme.scss and do not remove it from layout.html. Think of this stylesheet as a framework you are modifying and adding to. You can add styles or modify existing styles as you wish, but you should never remove them completely. Doing so almost certainly results in broken elements on various page types.
• These elements should always remain in the layout.html file (not hardcoded):
  • {% include "nav" %}
  • {{ content_for header }}
  • {{ content_for_footer }}
• Details matter: the forms and functionality should all operate properly. All components of the theme (forms, sidebars, top navigation, et.c) should have a custom design that plays into your overall design scheme.
• Use the liquid tags {% subpage %} or {% tag %}. It is important to clearly understand how these liquid tags work, as it is what displays forms, functionality and dynamic content from one page on another page. For example, it's how you would create a "latest blog posts", a “take action” form or "upcoming events" widget on your homepage. Use this technique to do one of those things. Learn more by reading the theme documentation.
• Keep customizations at the theme level as much as possible. New pages added to your site inherit customizations made at the theme level and not the page level. Your theme should maintain a consistent design layout as the site evolves.
• Don’t hard code editable site content in the HTML templates. Because NationBuilder includes a CMS, our customers expect to be able edit most content through the page editor WYSIWYG. Hard coding this content would require site admins to navigate template code, making for a frustrating editing experience and increasing the likelihood of the theme breaking.
• Build around engagement. NationBuilder sites are meant to inspire action and your theme should reflect this through creative use of forms, suggestion boxes, petitions, etc.

Resources

• Theme basics
• Liquid object reference guide
• Liquid examples
• Website HOWTOs

Dive into the API documentation to learn how your application can communicate with NationBuilder functionality. The API Explorer is a great place to experiment. The developer forum is a great place for help, hints and questions.

These exercises are meant to show that you have a working knowledge of both API's in general and the NationBuilder API specifically.

API Endpoint

• Events

  • Create an event
  • Make a form that allows others to update that event

• People

  • Create a person
  • Update the person
  • Delete the person

• Sites + People

  • Create a site with 3 basic pages
  • Make a form that creates people
  • Display the people on the basic pages

• Surveys + Contact

  • Create a survey
  • Log a contact when someone answers a survey question

Resources

• API documentation
• API Explorer