Trouble with Gatsy theme/starter

[plastikfan]

Hi, I'm having trouble with gatsby starters vs themes! I found a starter I would like to use (gatsby-gitbook-starter). I want to create documentation for multiple projects. However I want to create a common set of customisations to this starter and have them inherited to my child sites, this is clearly so I only have to define and maintain common customisations in 1 place.

So, these are the salient points:

• create middle-tier entity (dont know if this should be starter or a theme)
• this middle-tier needs to customise gatsby-gitbook-starter so that they are available to child sites
• these middle-tier customisations needs to be able to be done any time and inherited by child sites (unlike a starter)
• these customisations could be changing fonts defined in gatsby-gitbook-starter, styles, new common components, installation of bootstrap 5. All of the customisations should flow to the child sites seemlessly (via npm install/upgrade)
• the child sites will contain the markdown/MDX content, static data and related graphQL queries
• a child site should also be able override anything in the middle-tier by shadowing
• the starting point of the child site should be the gatsby-gitbook-starter content
• gatsby-gitbook-starter has its own extensive config, so I still need to be able to define it in the child-sites

What I tried so far (and failed)

• create a new my-starter using gatsby-gitbook-starter as the starter
• create a child-site with the default starter, then installed my-starter

This approach didnt work, because the starting point of the child-site was the default-start not gatsby-gitbook-starter as I intended.

I then tried to create child-site using gatsby-gitbook-starter as a starter, this failed with problems with the graphQL query.

After thinking about this a bit more, I thought perhaps I should do this:

• create a child-site using gatsby-gitbook-starter as the starter. This ensures that the starting point of the child-site contains the gatsby-gitbook-starter content
• create a middle-tier as a theme. The purpose of this theme is to override items in the gatsby-gitbook-starter. So for example, gatsby-gitbook-starter contains a layout, which I want to modify in a single place and share them to all child sites. However, you can't shadow a starter, so how do I make common customisations?

I'm sure that I'm not the first person that wants to do this kind of thing, ie create a common base from an existing starter, but I don't know how to go about this.

Resources I have already read are:

• Using a gatsby theme
• Modifying a starter
• Plugins, Themes & Starters and shadowing
• Theme API/shadowing
• Working with starters
• Themes update child theming and component shadowing

None of them quite seem to hit the nail on the head.

Can anyone assist? Thanks.