Snippets

To keep your templates clean and maintainable you should avoid to repeat yourself at all cost. Snippets are a great way to store code, which is being reused in multiple templates.

All snippets are stored in /site/snippets
Your site can have as many snippets as you need.

Loading snippets in your templates is straight forward:

Snippet	In your template
/site/snippets/header.php	<?php snippet('header') ?>
/site/snippets/menu.php	<?php snippet('menu') ?>
/site/snippets/footer.php	<?php snippet('footer') ?>

Example

The most basic use case for snippets is to split your header and footer into separate snippets. Let's take the finished template from the introduction tutorial and make parts of it reusable:

<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 code above looks clean as long as you just have a single template. But as soon as you add a second one, you have to write the top part and the bottom of the document again. This doesn't sound like a big deal until you have five or more templates and you plan to change the footer for example.

Let's clean this up a bit!

/site/snippets/header.php

<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>

/site/snippets/footer.php

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

</body>
</html>

Now that we have separated those parts the final template looks very clean:

<?php snippet('header') ?>

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

<?php snippet('footer') ?>

No matter how many more templates you are going to add to your site, the header and footer part is a piece of cake from now on. All you need to modify is the main part of the template.

Passing variables to snippets

Sometimes it is useful to pass a variable to a snippet.

<?php snippet('mysnippet', ['title' => 'Hello']) ?>

With the code above, /site/snippets/mysnippet.php will receive a title variable with the content "Hello!":

<?= $title ?>

A more useful case for this is an article list for a blog.

The template

<?php snippet('header') ?>

<main>

  <h1>Blog</h1>

  <?php foreach($page->children() as $article): ?>
  <?php snippet('article', ['article' => $article]) ?>
  <?php endforeach ?>

</main>

<?php snippet('footer') ?>

The article.php snippet

<article>
  <h1><?= $article->title()->html() ?></h1>
  <time><?= $article->date('d/m/Y') ?></time>
  <?= $article->intro()->kirbytext() ?></p>
  <a href="<?= $article->url() ?>">Read more…</a>
</article>

Snippet as variable value

The snippet() function has a third, optional parameter - boolean - which can be set to simply return the parsed text, instead of directly displaying it. This makes it possible to use snippets in a wide variety of situations, not just inside page templates:

$text = snippet('text', ['data' => $data], true);