Templating

Winter uses the Twig template language to provide markup for theme templates, such as those used for layouts, partials and individual pages. Winter also extends Twig with a number of functions, tags, filters and variables to allow you to use the CMS features and access the page environment information inside your templates.

It is recommended that you review the Twig documentation to understand the basics of using Twig. The Markup documentation on Winter CMS will mainly cover the additional Twig functionality and extensions that Winter provides.

#Variables

Template variables are printed on the page using the double curly bracket ({{ }}) format.

{{ variable }}

You may also use expressions inside double curly brackets for conditional output.

{{ isAjax ? 'Yes' : 'No' }}

If you wish to concatenate the output, you may do so with the tilde (~) character.

{{ 'Your name: ' ~ first_name ~ ' ' ~ last_name }}

If you use a variable that does not exist, by default, a null value is returned, which results in no output.

Winter provides "global" variables under the this variable, as listed under the Variables section.

#Tags

In Twig, tags are used for control and functionality that (generally) are not output to the page. Tags are wrapped with {% %} characters.

{% tag %}

Tags provide a more fluent way to describe template logic and implement conditions or flow.

{% if stormCloudComing %}
    Stay inside
{% else %}
    Go outside and play
{% endif %}

For example, the {% set %} tag can be used to set variables inside the template, which can then be used later on in the same template.

{% set activePage = 'blog' %}

My active page: {{ activePage }}

Tags can take on many different signatures and are listed under the Tags section.

#Filters

Filters act as modifiers to variables within the same variable tag, and are applied using a pipe symbol (|) followed by the filter name.

{{ 'string' | filter }}

Filters can take arguments like a function in PHP.

{{ price | currency('USD') }}

Filters can be applied in succession. Filters are applied from left to right, with the result of the first filter being passed as the input to the second filter, and so on.

{{ 'Winter Rain' | upper | replace({'Rain': 'Storm'}) }}

Filters are listed under the Filters section.

#Functions

Functions can be used within variable tags to display the output of logic that is defined by Winter, the theme or a plugin.

{{ theFunction() }}

Functions can take arguments.

{{ dump(variable) }}

Functions are listed under the Functions section.

#Access logic and priority

The most important thing to learn about Twig is how it accesses the PHP layer and how it prioritises the location of where a particular object or variable is read from. For example, using {{ foo.bar }} in your template to get the bar parameter of the foo object is determined in the following order:

1. Check if foo is an array and bar a valid element.
2. If not, and if foo is an object, check that bar is a valid property.
3. If not, and if foo is an object, check that bar is a valid method (even if bar is the constructor - use __construct() instead).
4. If not, and if foo is an object, check that getBar is a valid method.
5. If not, and if foo is an object, check that isBar is a valid method.
6. If not, return a null value.

#Unsupported features

There are some features offered by Twig that are not supported by Winter. They are listed below next to the equivalent feature.