Layouts

Layouts are templates that wrap around your resource’s content. They allow you to have the source code for your template in one place so you don’t have to repeat things like your navigation and footer on every page.

Layouts live in the _layouts folder. The convention is to have a base template called default.{erb,liquid,etc.} and have other layouts inherit from this as needed.

Usage #

The first step is to put the template source code in default.html. content is a special variable, the value is the rendered content of the resource being wrapped.

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>{{ resource.data.title }}</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <nav>
      <a href="/">Home</a>
      <a href="/blog/">Blog</a>
    </nav>
    <h1>{{ resource.data.title }}</h1>
    <section>
      {{ content }}
    </section>
    <footer>
      &copy; to me
    </footer>
  </body>
</html>

You have full access to the front matter of the resource. In the example above, resource.data.title comes from the resource’s front matter.

Once you’ve set up one or more layouts, you can specify what layout you’d like to use in your resource’s front matter.

---
title: My First Page
layout: default
---

This is the content of my page

The rendered output of this resource then is:

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>My First Page</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <nav>
      <a href="/">Home</a>
      <a href="/blog/">Blog</a>
    </nav>
    <h1>My First Page</h1>
    <section>
      This is the content of my page
    </section>
    <footer>
      &copy; to me
    </footer>
  </body>
</html>

You can also use front matter defaults to to avoid having to set a layout explicitly for every resource. Note that if you have defaults in place and you don’t want a certain resource to render in a layout, you can specify layout: none in the resource’s front matter.

If you you’re using ERB or another Ruby template language for your layout, try using the more idiomatic yield instead of content. Refer to the ERB and Beyond docs for further details.

New! Declarative Shadow DOM #

An emerging technology which has the potential to change how we approach development of layout and modular composition on the web is called Declarative Shadow DOM (DSD). Starting in Bridgetown 1.3, you can utilize DSD in your layouts and components for increased separation between presentation logic and content, scoped styles which won’t inadvertently affect other parts of the page (or other templates), and many other benefits. Check out our documentation on DSD for further details.

Inheritance #

Layout inheritance is useful when you want to add something to an existing layout for a portion of resources on your site. A common example of this is blog posts, you might want a post to display the date and author but otherwise be identical to your base layout.

To achieve this you need to create another layout which specifies your original layout in front matter. For example this layout will live at _layouts/post.html:

---
layout: default
---
<p>{{ resource.data.date }} - Written by {{ resource.data.author }}</p>

{{ content }}

Now posts can use this layout while the rest of the resources use the default.

Variables #

You can set front matter in layouts as well. Just use the layout variable instead of resource. For example:

---
city: San Francisco
---
<p>{{ layout.data.city }}</p>

{{ content }}

Components