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Using Twig Templates

This guide will help you start using Twig templates inside your ExpressionEngine site. First you will need to install Coilpack.

Once you have Coilpack and the latest version of ExpressionEngine 7 you can open up your code editor and create a new file at /ee/system/user/templates/default_site/example.group/index.html.twig. Inside this file add the following:

<html>
    <head>
        <title>{{ global.site_name }}</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Welcome to {{ global.site_name }}</h1>

        <a href="{{ global.site_url }}">Home</a>
    </body>
</html>

You should now be able visit your-site-url.test/example and see the template above rendered with your data.

This is just a simple example of using global variables in a Twig template however you can do much more when you have a site populated with content. Learning how to manage content in ExpressionEngine is beyond the scope of this guide but there is an excellent Introduction series on ExpressionEngine University.

Once you have a site with content we can create another Twig template to demonstrate how you can render your dynamic content.

Create a new file at /ee/system/user/templates/default_site/example.group/entry.html.twig. The following is an example of how we might fetch an entry and display the default title and date fields along with two custom fields. We have a File field named featured_image and an RTE field named page_content.

{% set entry = exp.channel.entries({limit:1}).first() %}
<html>
    <head>
        <title>{{ entry.title }} | {{ global.site_name }}</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>{{ entry.title }}</h1>
        <span>Published on {{ entry.entry_date }}</span>
        <img src="{{ entry.featured_image }}" />
        {{ entry.page_content | raw}}
    </body>
</html>
note

The Twig raw filter is used to prevent escaping the html tags that are part of the RTE output.

For more details check out our documentation on writing templates and the fieldtypes and tags that are available for you to use.

Twig functions and filters​

Coilpack is using the Laravel TwigBridge package to handle loading and parsing Twig templates. This library adds the following filters and functions to help you develop your templates.

Functions:

  • asset, action, url, route, secure_url, secure_asset
  • auth_check, auth_guest, auth_user
  • can
  • config_get, config_has
  • dump
  • input_get, input_old, input_has
  • link_to, link_to_asset, link_to_route, link_to_action
  • session_has, session_get, csrf_token, csrf_field, method_field
  • str_* (All the Str:: methods, snake_cased)
  • trans, trans_choice
  • url_* (All the URL:: methods, snake_cased)

Filters:

  • camel_case, snake_case, studly_case
  • str_* (All the Str:: methods, snake_cased)
  • trans, trans_choice