Working with Bolt / Content in Templates

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Perhaps the thing you'll do most in templates is accessing records of content. Either by requesting specific content, or implicitly when requesting pages that are the defaults for certain ContentTypes.

There are two ways that Bolt makes content accessible in templates:

• Implicitly: In a template that's being used for a single page or a listing, you'll always have the matching content available without having to fetch it via the setcontent-tag. See the section below on how to access the the content.
• Fetching other content: By using the {% setcontent %}-tag, you can retrieve records of any ContentType from the database, and make the data available to the templates. Much more information about setcontent, can be found in the chapter Fetching content.

Implicitly available content¶

If you've looked at the default templates, you might've wondered where Bolt 'magically' gets the content from. It's even the content that you need most of the time too! In fact, the rules for how Bolt does this are very simple. There are three distinct cases:

Single record pages¶

In a page that's used for a single record, (like entry.twig or record.twig), the variable {{ record }} will always be available, regardless of the ContentType. To make the templates more 'semantic', there's also a variable with the singular name of the ContentType available, like {{ page }}, {{ entry }} or {{ event }}.

Record listing pages¶

In pages that are used for listings, there's always a variable {{ records }} available, regardless of the ContentType. Similar to the single record pages, there's also a more semanticly named variable with the plural name of the ContentType, like {{ pages }}, {{ entries }} or {{ events }}.

Note: This is the case for all normal listings, but also for taxonomy overview pages and search results.

The Homepage¶

In your config.yml you can set which record is used for the homepage of the site, and you can set the template as well:

homepage: page/1
homepage_template: index.twig

In this template, you will have a {{ record }} available, as well as a variable with the same name as the singular version of the ContentType. In the example above, it would be {{ page }}.

If you've set the homepage to use not one singular record, but a group of records, like this:

homepage: entries/latest/10

Then you would have {{ records }} available, as well as a variable with the name of the ContentType. In this case, it would be {{ pages }}.

For more information on how Bolt selects which templates to use, see Templating and Routing. To learn more about actually using the content records in your templates, see Record and Records.