How to customise

By the end, you should feel comfortable tailoring the template’s folders, dashboards, and workflows to suit your startup. (If you don’t have the template yet, get it here).

The structure was developed to be flexible, and you can customise and rename everything.

With Obsidian, you can edit the source code, change the design with CSS, and add functionality with community plugins or your own scripts. Below we’ll cover the main ways to customise this template.

Plugins

The most basic place to start with customisation is via the wealth of community plugins. If you need an additional feature or API, then it’s likely someone else has already created it.

In the Obsidian settings, go to Community Plugins and hit Browse. Be mindful to only use plugins that are trusted. A good (but not foolproof) indicator is how many others have downloaded it.

Customising the home dashboard

This vault is built around the home dashboard as the main navigator. The home dashboard consists of Dataview queries listing the live deliverables and hubs, your recent documents and there buttons are buttons that perform certain actions (eg saving an article in the same format, saving link to this location and saving a resource there).

The queries can all be edited. If it is not showing what you want, drop it into ChatGPT and request your adaptions. Do remember to save the initial working query as a reference! If the query has >> before each line, then request ChatGPT copy the format and output as an MD file so it does not render.

Buttons on dashboards

For buttons, you can search the vault for the file “Buttons for Obsidian” to see a centralised list of the buttons used. If you view the button in source mode, you’ll be able to see the name of the command or they call.

Most call quickadd. And so you can pop to Obsidian settings –> Quickadd find the matching name and edit the buttons functionality there.

You can also change the label of the button in this centralised location and it will update everywhere.

You can add a button to a dashboard by using two ticks and writing the button id eg `Button-ID-Listed-Beneath-Each-Button`.

You can link any command in the command panel to a button, and you can also bundle a few commands and save them as one using QuickAdd macros (more on this later).

Customising templates

All templates live inside the “5 Archive/Templates” folder in your Obsidian vault. Templates are organised into Hubs and Deliverables, Meeting templates (for different meeting types), Reflections (for the weekly and quarterly reflection templates), and Resources templates (for the resources folder).

In many cases, you’ll find two versions: one made for Templater (when you create a new file directly in the folder) and one made for QuickAdd (when the file is created via a QuickAdd command). It’s good practice to update one, then get ChatGPT to update the second for you to match the changes you made in the first.

You can trace back which template is used by looking at the QuickAdd command a button calls (check the “Buttons for Obsidian” file).

You can make any edits you like here, and add even more templates.

This is where you make changes to the queries that show on every new dashboard, the YAML to keep everything queryable, and the file name formats etc. (Combined with quickadd).

Of course, you can also just customise the template after it is made. Maybe you want your marketing one in a different format to your fundraising – that is very easy to do and requires no adaption of templates!

Customising task management

The backlog lists every task. A task is added by the script “TaskListAddedQuickadd.js” which is found in the Scripts folder. This script controls how tasks are added, the menu selection menus.

Another script called “closeTask.js” manages the updates and anything that is offered on the Update task button.

If you want to change how you work with tasks. The tags that are auto created, the priority score system, the flow of a deliverable being committed, the labels on the prompts, then edit these two scripts.

Customising meta

Dataview lets you query metadata, including whats in the YAML (the hidden part at the top of the file). You can add your own metadata here by editing the YAML in the templates too. Just make sure it all stays consistent (including letter case) or you’ll have a hard time querying.

Opening the vault in Visual Studio Code lets you find and replace something across the whole vault. This means you can update meta keys on mass. I do recommend finding the key with the colon and space eg find “Key: ” and replace with “Keys: ” so that its more likely to update the meta data rather than the word “Key” if used somewhere else in a note.

Changing folder names

I recommend only changing the core folder names (Inbox, Hubs, Deliverables, Resources, Archive) before you start using Obsidian. Once you have notes, bulk editing the word “Deliverables” could cause issues.

If you do change the names. Then you MUST find and replace across the whole folder. Or the templates, queries, quickadd and scripts will not work (or require a lot of manual updating).

1. Open the vault as a folder in Visual Studio Code
2. Click edit –> Replace in Files
3. Search the word using Match case. So you change Deliverables to Projects; deliverables to projects; and DELIVERABLES to PROJECTS
4. You must change file names on the file itself. Remember to do for the Archive version too.
5. You shouldn’t need to update file paths as if just targeting one word then it would have found this word in each of the file paths.

If you update the folder names AFTER your notes are in there. It is still possible, but you’ll need to be more careful. You can target “Hubs: ” in the YAML, then target “2 Hubs”, “_Hubs”, “/hubs” and “Hubs:: “. Getting the scripts is a bit harder, but after this you’ll see what “Hubs” are left in the files and figure out ways to target them, eg perhaps in the Script file you see it always used in the same way eg {{VALUE:HUBS}}. Remember when updating in this way, you need to include the same format in the replace part. {{VALUE:HUBS}} needs to change to {{VALUE:NEW TERM}}.

Changing file paths

If you move a folder location out of its parent or you rename a folder, you’ll need to update its file path. The easiest way is again a bulk edit to get every instance. Find the old file path and replace with the new.

Eg Find 2 Hubs/Team/Reflections/ and replace with the new path 1 Inbox/Reflections/.

This will get every reference to the file path in scripts, queries and links. Keeping everything updated.

Creating quickadd macros and menus

You can find which button uses which quickadd command by looking at the button in source mode within the centralised “Buttons for Obsidian” note.

When you open some of the QuickAdd commands (Settings → QuickAdd → Edit command), you’ll see some are macros, which means they fire multiple commands in a certain order. Some add a template, some fire a script.

The most important thing is that the key prompts (e.g. {{VALUE:This is the key prompt}}) are consistent across every command within that macro and also in the templates it references. Otherwise it will assume the prompts are for different values and ask you for the same values multiple times within the same flow.

If you wish to delete something from a buttons actions, then you must find the button, then the step you wish to delete. If you deleted the worklog and now keep getting the error this note does not exist, that is because it is still looking for it in the quickadd macro that you called. So you’ll need to go in and delete the worklog step from the flow you see the error in (in this example that will be all as you no longer want the work log). There will be no issues caused by deleting that step. But in another example if you see an error that the worklog does not exist and you just changed the file name or location of the worklog, then it is better to do a bulk edit that to go into every single quickadd macro and update its name.

If you are worried about modifying then you can always duplicate the macro before you start so that you have a backup to go back to.

You can get very creative with macros and can even attach JS scripts that help automate your vault.

Adding scripts

You’ll find the scripts this vault uses under “5 Obsidian setup/Scripts/”. There is a list of what the scripts do in “5 Archive/5 Obsidian setup/References/Scripts in this vault” for your reference.

Open them in VS Code to change what you need, or add additional scripts. This is the best way to build automations, but only customise here if you know what you’re doing, or have a backup at least!

Good luck tailoring the vault to meet the exact needs of your team!