CMS building blocks overview

Developers utilize a series of building blocks to create websites on HubSpot's CMS software. The building blocks can be used to create a design system for content creators to work within, with varying degrees of flexibility and guardrails depending on your business needs.

A Theme is a portable and contained package of developer created assets designed to work together to enable a marketer-friendly content editing experience. A theme is a top-level building block that define the look and feel of a website and create a marketer-friendly content-editing experience.

Templates define the base markup and style of a set of pages that use a template. When content creators create a page or email, they select a template to use before populating it with content. 

Modules are reusable components that you can place on templates and pages in the HubSpot CMS. They include controls for marketers and contain HubL/HTML markup, CSS, and JavaScript that together build reusable and editable components of a website.

Fields are the controls that content creators use to adjust the parameters passed into your themes and modules. Fields allow the building blocks developers create to be reusable across different pieces of content. 

Global content allows markup and content to be globally shared across a website. Global content makes managing elements like headers, footers, sidebars or other global elements of a website simple. 

Menus allow you to easily build a navigation hierarchy and information architecture for navigating your website. 

Forms allow you to capture multiple types of information from users (such as address information, email addresses, and feedback) which you can then use throughout the HubSpot Ecosystem in areas such as smart content, workflows, content personalization, and more in your day-to-day operations.

Website settings is a single place where various global and system-level settings can be configured for your website, such as your logo, favicon, system templates and more.