Your first template

A template contains all the content for the current page.
This would be a completely valid template:

<html>
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <title>My Page</title>
</head>
<body>
  Hello world!
</body>
</html>

But of course it wouldn't be very smart. Nothing in this template is dynamic. It would just render a very basic HTML document with a title and some text.

Let's start by adding some dynamic content.

$site

<html>
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <title>
    <?= $site->title() ?>
  </title>
</head>
<body>
  Hello world!
</body>
</html>

In this example we are using a very simple PHP tag to replace the hard-coded document title with $site->title()

The $site object contains all important information about your site in general and all data stored in /content/site.txt

/content/site.txt

A basic site.txt looks like this:

title: My Site
----
description: This is my wonderful new site
----
keywords: my, new, site

It's the perfect place to store any data that you want to reuse throughout your site. Next to typical things like the description and keyword metatags you can also store a Twitter or Facebook account for example.

title: My Site
----
description: This is my wonderful new site
----
keywords: my, new, site
----
copyright: 2014 - Acme Inc.
----
facebook: http://facebook.com/myaccount
----
twitter: http://twitter.com/myaccount

All this data can be used in your templates instantly:

<html>
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <meta name="description" content="<?= $site->description() ?>">
  <meta name="keywords" content="<?= $site->keywords() ?>">
  <title>
    <?= $site->title() ?>
  </title>
</head>
<body>

  <header>
    <h1 class="logo">
      <a href="<?= $site->url() ?>">
        <?= $site->title() ?>
      </a>
    </h1>
  </header>

  Hello world!

  <footer>

    <p class="copyright"><?= $site->copyright() ?></p>

    <ul>
      <li><a href="<?= $site->twitter() ?>">Twitter</a></li>
      <li><a href="<?= $site->facebook() ?>">Facebook</a></li>
    </ul>

  </footer>

</body>
</html>

As you can see, the $site object also contains the main URL of your site, which can be used to link the logo back to your homepage for example. There are many more available methods available for the $site object, which you can find on the cheat sheet

This is all great for the basic framework of our template, but now it's time to pull in some dynamic data for the current page.

$page

<html>
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <meta name="description" content="<?= $site->description() ?>">
  <meta name="keywords" content="<?= $site->keywords() ?>">
  <title>
    <?= $page->title() ?> | <?= $site->title() ?>
  </title>
</head>
<body>

  <header>
    <h1>
      <a href="<?= $site->url() ?>">
        <?= $site->title() ?>
      </a>
    </h1>
  </header>

  <main>
    <h1><?= $page->title() ?></h1>
    <?= $page->text() ?>
  </main>

  <footer>
    <a href="<?= $site->twitter() ?>">Twitter</a>
    <a href="<?= $site->facebook() ?>">Facebook</a>
  </footer>

</body>
</html>

The document title and the main container of the page are now completed with data from the currently visited page.

<?= $page->title() ?>

… and …

<?= $page->text() ?>

Those variables get their content come from the text file of the current page.

Example

URL

yourdomain.com/about

Text file

/content/about/about.txt

Data

Title: About us
----
Text: We are a company.

You are free to extend the data in a text file however needed. A text file can contain any number of fields. Fields must be separated by four regular dashes (----). Fetching the content of such a field always works the same way:

Field name	Variable
Title:	$page->title()
Text:	$page->text()
FirstName:	$page->firstname()
Company-Name:	$page->company_name()

Fieldnames are converted to lowercase and any punctuation is replaced by lower dashes.

Exceptions when using reserved words

If you use field names in your text file, which are also used by native Kirby methods, e.g. "image", "videos", "audio", or "num", you cannot fetch the data like described above. To fetch the content of such fields, you have to use the content() method:

Field name	Variable
Image:	$page->content()->image()
Videos:	$page->content()->videos()
audio:	$page->content()->audio()