Avando AVE Free

Free. Lean. Privacy-friendly. And you can restyle it without rewriting a stylesheet.

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Avando AVE Free – the modern Contao theme for clubs, parishes and volunteers

Avando AVE is a theme framework for Contao 5.7 and 6. For non-commercial websites it is free of charge and can be used on any number of domains: clubs and associations, parishes, schools, nurseries, foundations, community initiatives and private sites.

  • €0 for non-commercial websites
  • For Contao 5.7 LTS and Contao 6
  • Optimized for AI agents
  • Web standards of the latest generation: lightweight and fast
  • No third-party modules, no CDN, no tracking
  • You can upgrade to AVE Pro without problems

Note: the demo site shows the Design Studio only for demonstration purposes. It is not contained in the free edition (only Pro).

Documentation

What makes AVE different

Many themes are a finished picture, and every change means copying templates, hunting through CSS and hoping the next update won't overwrite it. AVE is built differently. The name stands for Advanced Variable Environment: the entire look depends on 254 named design variables. Change one value and everything that refers to it follows.

Five lines in your custom.css are enough for a look of your own:

:root {
  --av-color-primary: #2f6f4f;
  --av-font-display: var(--av-font-serif);
  --av-radius-scale: .6;
  --av-space-scale: 1.1;
}

The secondary colour, hover tones, muted text and dark mode are all derived from these automatically.

Highlights

✔ Design fields instead of CSS classes: editors style content with select fields

✔ Sections with layout, background and hero height right on the article

✔ Element styles: cards, buttons, image shapes and more right on the content element

✔ "AI generated image" tags with one click

✔ Automatic dark mode, with a light/dark switch for visitors

✔ One-page navigation as a dedicated module

✔ Background video with poster image and pause button

✔ 60 SVG icons for buttons, chosen from a select field

✔ 30 KB of CSS in total (gzip), 8 KB of own JavaScript

✔ No third-party Contao modules, only Contao's own content elements

✔ Update-safe: your customisations live separately from the theme

✔ Ready to go: the installation creates the theme, page layout and navigation for you

For editors: design without expert knowledge

Pages are built from ordinary Contao content elements such as text, image, headline, accordion and slider. AVE adds design fields to them. Nobody has to memorise a class name or type into the CSS field. That makes it ideal for websites maintained by changing volunteers.

Sections: Articles, element groups, news and events get a “Design” panel with these fields:

  • Column layout: two, three, four or six columns, asymmetric, auto grid, text + image, content + sidebar; stacks automatically on mobile
  • Backgrounds: surfaces, brand colours, image with overlay, video, gradients, frosted glass
  • Hero heights from a third to the full screen height
  • Text colour, text size, alignment, spacing, dividers
  • Background images are resized automatically and delivered as WebP

Content elements: Every element gets an “Element Style” panel with these fields:

  • Frames: card, interactive card, tile, shadow, rounded, media card
  • Buttons from the hyperlink element: primary, secondary, outline, ghost, glass and more, with icon
  • Image shapes: rounded, squircle, circle, blob, with coloured border
  • Headlines with a visual size independent of their level
  • Width across several columns, custom backgrounds, alignment

Ready-made building blocks: blog and event lists as cards or rows, “upcoming events”, accordion styles, sliders, lightbox for galleries.

Privacy and accessibility: good foundations out of the box

  • All files on your own server: no CDN, no external fonts, no tracking and no cookies from the theme. Nothing that needs a consent banner.
  • System fonts by default: fast and with no third parties. You can add your own fonts locally.
  • Reduced motion is respected: animations are switched off and videos show their poster image.
  • Focus outlines and dark mode come from the framework.
  • Semantic HTML: the accordion is <details>, the dialog is <dialog>, the navigation is <nav>.

As with any theme, alt texts, a sensible heading order and checking the finished site remain your job.

Technology

  • Contao 5.7 LTS and 6, PHP 8.3+, 100 % native Twig, no legacy templates
  • No Bootstrap, no Tailwind, no jQuery. The only library underneath is Open Props (7.5 KB) with named values.
  • CSS cascade with @layer: your custom.css always wins, without !important.
  • No build step: native CSS variables, no Sass, no bundler
  • AI-ready: a cheat sheet listing every token and all 136 utility classes, plus build rules for AI assistants, are included.

Terms of the free licence

AVE Free may be used free of charge on any number of domains as long as all three conditions are met:

  1. The website is non-commercial. This covers, for example, clubs and associations, parishes, schools, nurseries, foundations, community initiatives, self-help groups and private sites. A donation appeal, membership fees or small sales in line with the club's purpose are fine.
  2. Nobody is paid for the website. This applies to design, setup, maintenance and training. Volunteer work, reimbursement of expenses and Germany's tax-free volunteer allowance (Ehrenamtspauschale) are fine.
  3. The notice in the footer stays visible: “Built with the free Avando AVE theme for Contao”. The theme outputs it by itself; you don't need to add anything.

You may modify the source code. The full licence terms are included in the package.

Switch to Pro at any time, without starting over

Has the club project turned into a client job, or do you want more convenience? Then upgrade the existing website to Avando AVE Pro. It includes a commercial licence per domain, no footer notice and the Design Studio, which lets you adjust every value live in the frontend.

  1. Buy a Pro licence and enter the Pro token from your delivery in the backend. The footer notice disappears.
  2. Install the Design Studio: you receive the package with your licence, installation instructions included.
  3. Carry on working. Pages, content, design fields and your custom.css stay exactly as they are. No theme switch, no migration.

Avando AVE: design as a setting, not a rebuild.

Theme details

Vendor AvandoLabs (show all themes)

Contao versions

  • 6.0
  • 5.7

Browser compatibility Chrome ab 123, Firefox ab 128, Safari ab 17.5, Edge

Date added October 10, 2026

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License terms

The following license terms apply to the theme:

This English version is a translation provided for information only. The German version is legally binding.

Version 1.0 · As of 1 September 2026

Licensor: Dipl.-Ing. (FH) Ulrich Braun (Avando Labs) (hereinafter “Licensor”), address for service in the legal notice at avando-labs.de/impressum

Contact: themes@avando-labs.de · avando-labs.de

Summary (not part of the contract, just a reading aid — in case of doubt the text of the sections prevails): There are two ways to use this theme. Whoever pays runs it on one domain and needs no attribution. In that case you purchase the Pro version. Whoever doesn't pay may use it on any number of websites — but only if the website is non-commercial, nobody is paid for building it and the attribution stays in the footer.

§ 1 Subject matter

(1) The subject matter of this licence is the Contao theme Avando AVE (Composer package avando/ave) including all stylesheets, templates, PHP classes, configuration files, icons and documentation contained therein (hereinafter “the Software”).

(2) The Design Studio (avando/ave-editor) is not covered by this licence. This add-on package is governed by its own licence, which accompanies it (see § 8).

(3) The Software is licensed, not sold. All rights not expressly granted here remain with the Licensor.

§ 2 The two ways of use at a glance

  Route A — Commercial licence Route B — Free licence
Cost one-off per domain none
Number of websites one domain per licence unlimited
Purpose of the website any, including commercial non-commercial only
Paid creation of the website allowed not allowed
Attribution in the page footer not required required
Modifying the source code yes yes
Passing on to third parties no no

Exactly one of the two routes must be chosen for each individual website. Anyone who does not (or no longer) meets the requirements of Route B needs a licence under Route A for that website.

§ 3 Route A — Commercial licence

(1) By purchasing a commercial licence, the Licensee obtains the simple (non-exclusive), perpetual, non-transferable right to operate the Software publicly on one (1) domain — for any purpose, including a commercial one.

(2) A domain within the meaning of this licence is a registered domain name including all of its subdomains. example.com, www.example.com and shop.example.com are therefore one domain and require one licence. A different second-level domain — including a different country extension of the same name (example.de) — is a further domain and requires a further licence.

(3) Non-public installations of the same website are not counted: local development environments, test and staging instances as well as backups, provided they are not accessible to the public or indexed by search engines.

(4) The licence is tied to the domain, not to a person. It may be transferred once to another domain if the website moves and the old domain no longer runs the Software. Selling or leasing the licence to third parties is excluded.

(5) Agencies and service providers may set up and customise the Software on behalf of their clients. A licence is required per client domain.

§ 4 Route B — Free licence for non-commercial websites

(1) The Software may be used free of charge and on any number of domains if all of the following conditions are met:

  1. The website is non-commercial within the meaning of paragraph 2.
  2. Nobody receives remuneration within the meaning of paragraph 3 for the conception, design, setup, customisation, content entry, training or maintenance of this website.
  3. The attribution according to § 5 is present on the website and remains permanently visible.

(2) A website is non-commercial if it serves neither directly nor indirectly to make a profit. This includes in particular websites of registered associations, parishes, schools, nurseries, foundations, citizens' initiatives, self-help groups and volunteer projects, as well as purely private websites. A call for donations, a membership fee, an association magazine or a small sale within the scope of the association's purpose does no harm, as long as the operation of the website itself is not aimed at profit.

The following in particular are not non-commercial: websites of companies and freelancers, online shops, booking and rental sites, advertising-financed offerings, affiliate sites and websites that advertise a paid offering.

(3) Remuneration is any consideration with monetary value — fee, hourly wage, flat rate, payment in kind, offsetting or barter. As soon as anyone is paid for building or running the website, Route B no longer applies, even if the website itself remains non-commercial. In this case a licence under § 3 must be purchased; who purchases it — service provider or client — is left to the parties involved.

Expressly not remuneration are: volunteer work, the reimbursement of documented expenses (hosting, domain, photo material) and the volunteer allowance under Section 3 No. 26a of the German Income Tax Act (EStG).

(4) The Licensor may revoke the free use for the future if the requirements cease to apply. Revocation is made in text form with a notice period of 30 days; within this period a licence under § 3 may be purchased.

§ 5 Attribution (Route B only)

(1) The Software outputs the notice itself. It appears at the end of every page and reads:

Built with the free Avando AVE theme for Contao

The notice is generated by the Software's page layout (bundle/contao/templates/twig/page/layout.html.twig, block .ave-credit) and styled by its stylesheet. There is nothing to add — there is only nothing to remove.

(2) Any measure that makes the notice invisible or illegible is prohibited, in particular:

  • removing or commenting out the block in the template or in an overridden version of the template,
  • display:none, visibility:hidden, zero height or opacity, moving it out of the visible area, covering it with other elements,
  • reducing the font size or colour contrast below what the Software delivers,
  • removing the link or redirecting it to another address,
  • suppressing the notice via JavaScript after the page has loaded.

(3) Adjustments that do not impair legibility are permitted: a translation of the sentence into the language of the website, a surface or font adapted to the page design, a different position within the page footer.

(4) The link carries rel=“nofollow“. This is intentional and not an oversight: an attribution line that appears on thousands of websites at the same time is exactly the pattern search engines assess as a link scheme — the markup therefore protects both sides. It must not be removed.

(5) Anyone who has purchased a licence under § 3 may remove the notice, but does not have to. This is not done by changing the template, but via the Pro token included with the delivery. It is entered in the back end in the website root of the licensed domain (field “Pro token” in the section “Avando AVE”); alternatively in the configuration of the installation (avando_ave.license in config/config.yaml).

This way the decision survives every update, and it remains traceable when it was made. A modified template falls back at the next update; a page layout overridden in the project also freezes all future improvements to it.

(6) The Pro token is part of the licence and must be treated like an access key. Passing it on to third parties, publishing it or using it on a domain without its own licence under § 3 is a breach of § 7 and terminates the licence under § 13.

§ 6 Permitted on both routes

(1) Installing, operating and backing up the Software on own or rented infrastructure.

(2) Modifying the source code for one's own website: own stylesheets, overridden templates, changed tokens, added classes. The Licensor owes no support for customised installations, and updates may overwrite customisations.

(3) Making any number of backup copies.

(4) Passing it on to a commissioned service provider for the purpose of working on the licensed website. The service provider does not acquire any right of use of their own from this.

§ 7 Prohibited on both routes

(1) Passing on, publishing, selling, renting, lending or sublicensing the Software or parts of it to third parties — including in modified or renamed form or as part of one's own product, theme, template, website builder or template collection.

(2) Making the source code publicly available, for example in a public repository, a package registry or a download area.

(3) Use in an offering that makes the Software available to third parties as part of a website builder, site generator or multi-tenant system, unless a licence under § 3 exists for every domain operated in this way.

(4) Removing, altering or obscuring copyright, trademark or licence notices in the source code.

(5) Circumventing or defeating technical measures for licence verification.

(6) Using the Software or its components to train machine learning models that generate source code or designs.

§ 8 Design Studio (Pro add-on)

The Design Studio (avando/ave-editor) is a paid add-on and not part of Route B. The theme is fully functional without the Studio — all design values are available as CSS tokens in the stylesheets and can be overridden by hand. The Studio is governed by the licence in ave-editor/LICENSE.md.

§ 9 Third-party components

The Software contains and loads third-party components that are subject to their own licences. For the respective components, these licences take precedence over this licence. The overview is in THIRD-PARTY.md.

In particular: fonts are not included, but loaded from Google Fonts when needed and stored locally. They are subject to the SIL Open Font License or the Apache License; the licence file is stored next to the font file on download and must remain there.

Demo content (sample texts, sample images, sample PDFs under files/demo/) is not part of the licensed Software. It serves demonstration purposes and must not be taken over into a published website.

§ 10 Updates and support

(1) There is no entitlement to updates, new features or support unless expressly agreed otherwise.

(2) If updates are provided, these licence terms apply to them in the version enclosed in each case.

§ 11 Warranty

(1) The Software is provided in its respective state. The Licensor does not warrant that it is fit for a particular purpose, uninterrupted or free of errors.

(2) For Route B (provision free of charge), the Licensor is liable for material defects and defects of title only in the case of fraudulent concealment.

(3) The Licensee remains responsible for the lawful operation of their website — in particular for the legal notice, privacy policy, consents, accessibility and image rights. Notes in the Software or its documentation on these topics are assistance, not legal advice and not a warranted characteristic.

§ 12 Liability

(1) The Licensor is liable without limitation for intent and gross negligence, for injury to life, body or health and under the German Product Liability Act.

(2) In the event of a slightly negligent breach of an essential contractual obligation, liability is limited to the foreseeable damage typical of the contract, at most to the licence fee paid for the domain concerned. Otherwise liability is excluded.

(3) The Licensee backs up their data themselves. The Licensor is liable for the loss of data only to the extent that would have arisen had the data been backed up properly.

§ 13 Term and termination

(1) The licence is valid for an unlimited period.

(2) It terminates automatically in the event of a breach of § 5 or § 7. The Software must then be removed from all affected systems.

(3) A breach that is fully remedied within 14 days of a request in text form leaves the licence unaffected. This option exists once.

§ 14 Changes to this licence

The Licensor may issue future versions of this licence. For a licence already purchased, the version enclosed at the time of purchase applies.

§ 15 Final provisions

(1) The law of the Federal Republic of Germany applies, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG).

(2) The place of jurisdiction is Hainichen, provided the Licensee is a merchant, a legal entity under public law or a special fund under public law.

(3) Should a provision be invalid, the validity of the remaining provisions shall not be affected. The invalid provision shall be replaced by what comes closest to its economic purpose.

(4) Amendments and additions require text form.