Introduction for developers

Introduction

The structured markup can be generated in two ways:

• using the API
• with view helpers in Fluid templates

Each type in the schema.org vocabulary corresponds to a PHP model that provides the available properties. There is also a view helper for each type that makes it easy to integrate the data into your website via a Fluid template.

Attention should be paid to the following points:

• A web page can be characterised by different schema.org types as outlined in this chapter. The WebPage type is set automatically if the corresponding configuration option is set. But it can always overridden manually with the desired type and properties. The chapter The WebPage type is dedicated to this topic.
• A breadcrumb does not only help the user to recognise the location of a particular page on the website. It is also helpful for search engines to understand the structure of your website. Google honors the website operator for using the breadcrumb schema markup on a page: It will be shown in the search result snippet.
• The main entity of a web page indicates the primary entity. It can be set separately from a WebPage.

Quick dive-in

The schema.org vocabulary consists of many types, like Person, Organization, Product, and so on. They are written with an upper letter at the beginning of the term.

Each type has several properties which characterise the specific type, like givenName or lastName for a Person. The properties start with a lower letter at the beginning in the vocabulary.

The most generic type is Thing. Each other type inherits the properties from one or more other types, e.g: Corporation is a specific type for Organization and defines a new property. Organization itself is a specific type of Thing and inherits the properties of Thing and defines many more properties characterising this type.

You can retrieve the information about a type or property from the URL https://schema.org/ followed by the term name. (for example, https://schema.org/Person) or the name of the property (for example, https://schema.org/givenName).

<?php

declare(strict_types=1);

namespace MyVendor\MyExtension\Controller;

use Brotkrueml\Schema\Type\TypeFactory;

final class MyController
{
    public function __construct(
        private readonly TypeFactory $typeFactory,
    ) {}

    public function doSomething(): void
    {
        // ...

        $thing = $this->typeFactory->create('Thing');
        $thing->setProperty('name', 'A thing');

        // ...
    }
}

<?php

declare(strict_types=1);

namespace MyVendor\MyExtension\Controller;

use Brotkrueml\Schema\Manager\SchemaManager;
use Brotkrueml\Schema\Type\TypeFactory;

final class MyController
{
    public function __construct(
        private readonly SchemaManager $schemaManager,
        private readonly TypeFactory $typeFactory,
    ) {}

    public function doSomething(): void
    {
        // ...

        $thing = $this->typeFactory->create('Thing');
        $thing->setProperty('name', 'A thing');

        $this->schemaManager->addType($thing);

        // ...
    }
}

<schema:type.thing name="A thing"/>