Content Blocks

• Introduction
• Rendering content blocks
• Passing variables to content blocks
  • Global variables

Introduction

Content blocks are text, HTML or Markdown blocks that can be edited separately from the page or layout. They are designed to hold static content only and support basic templating variables. Partials are more flexible and should be used for generating dynamic content.

Content blocks files reside in the /content subdirectory of a theme directory. The following extensions are supported for content files:

The extension affects the way content blocks are displayed in the backend user interface (with a WYSIWYG editor or with a plain text editor) and how the blocks are rendered on the website. Markdown blocks are converted to HTML before they are displayed.

Rendering content blocks

Use the {% content 'file.htm' %} tag to render a content block in a page, partial or layout. Example of a page rendering a content block:

url = "/contacts"
==
<div class="contacts">
    {% content 'contacts.htm' %}
</div>

Passing variables to content blocks

Sometimes you may need to pass variables to a content block from the external code. While content blocks do not support the use of Twig markup, they do support using variables with a basic syntax. You can pass variables to content blocks by specifying them after the content block name in the {% content %} tag:

{% content 'welcome.htm' name='John' %}

Inside the content block, variables can be accessed using singular curly brackets:

<h1>This is a demo for {name}</h1>

More information can be found in the Markup guide.

Global variables

You may register variables that are globally available to all content blocks with the View::share method.

View::share('site_name', 'Winter CMS');

This code could be called inside the register or boot method of a plugin registration file. Using the above example, the variable {site_name} will be available inside all content blocks.