Waymark
Waymark is the starter template a cairn site begins from: a complete public site with the admin already wired. Out of the directory you get a home page, posts with a year-grouped archive, feeds and a sitemap, light and dark schemes, a styleguide, and the set of content components an editor can insert without asking anyone. It holds up from a 320-pixel phone to an ultra-wide monitor, and it is deliberately neutral, a humanist sans on plain paper, because it expects to be restyled rather than lived in as-is.
One CSS file
The site you’re reading is Waymark plus one file. The cairn theme swaps in a display serif, tints the paper warm, and adds a few prose gestures; nothing else changes. The routes, the components, and the admin stay exactly as they were.
@import './theme.css';
@import './cairn.css'; /* the whole restyle */
Every color and size the public surface uses comes from tokens in one theme.css, and the template’s own CI holds that seam honest: no literal colors on the reading surface, and every shipped pairing proven against the WCAG AA contrast floor in both color gamuts. What you inherit is a token seam that starts out accessible, and a restyle edits tokens in one file instead of hunting through components.
What’s in the box
Markdown covers the prose. For everything else an editor gets an insert menu: callouts and alerts, pull quotes, question-and-answer blocks, a video card that links out instead of embedding the player, an icon set, a call-to-action block, and a time-limited announcement banner. Images come in through the site’s media library, with captions and the written description a screen reader needs. All of it renders on the styleguide, live on this site, in the theme you’re looking at.
Get started
Make it your own
Make Waymark your own walks the token seam file by file, with the cairn theme as its worked example, a complete re-skin you can read end to end. When a walkthrough video of the editor exists it will live on this page; the styleguide is the closest look until then.
Is cairn maintained?
Yes, actively. cairn is one developer’s tool, built for the small sites its author runs; it carries two production sites besides this one, and this site is managed by its own admin.
What does it cost?
The software is free, MIT-licensed. Hosting is Cloudflare: the sign-in email needs the paid Workers plan, five US dollars a month, and past that a small site’s usage rounds to zero.
How is sign-in handled?
By email. An editor enters their address, clicks the link that arrives, and is signed in on that device; there are no passwords anywhere in the system. Sessions live in the site’s own database, and every publish is a git commit made through a GitHub App, authored in the editor’s name.