Fluid templates

Accessing Variables

An integral part of Fluid are variables. This is the data that is provided by the backend to be used inside your template. You can access variables like this:

<h1>{myHeadline}</h1>

If a variable contains subitems, these can be accessed with the dot syntax:

<p>{myVariable.mySubItem}</p>

Modifying Variables

You can also do some basic math operations:

{myNumber + 5}

If you need to modify the provided data even more, you can use so-called ViewHelpers. These are functions that take some input values, perform operations on those values and then output the result. The following example converts a variable to uppercase:

<f:format.case mode="upper">{myText}</f:format.case>

If you want to perform multiple operations on one variable or if your templates become more complex, you might also want to use Fluid's inline notation.

Using Control Structures

ViewHelpers are also used for so-called control structures. If you want to add a condition to your template, you can use the If ViewHelper <f:if>:

<f:if condition="{myVariable} == 'hello'">
    The variable is "hello".
</f:if>

You can also use the For ViewHelper <f:for> to loop over an array:

<ul>
    <f:for each="{myList}" as="myItem">
        <li>This item is {myItem}.</li>
    </f:for>
</ul>

Templates, Layouts and Partials

Fluid knows three different types of template files: Templates, Layouts and Partials. Templates are always the starting point and thus are always required, while both Partials and Layouts are optional. However, these can be very helpful to improve the structure of your templates and can avoid duplicate code, which makes maintenance much easier.

Layouts are a flexible method to reuse HTML markup that should wrap around multiple template files. You could for example extract your header and footer markup to a layout file and only keep the content in-between in your template. Layouts automatically have access to all variables defined within the template.

Partials are an easy way to abstract and reuse code snippets in your templates. They don't have access to all template variables, instead the required variables need to be provided to the partial when it is used.