Twig

Symfony follows the template approach and we use this in Mapbender. Symfony uses a templating engine to generate HTML, CSS or other content.

Twig is a templating engine that is packaged in Symfony and offers an easy and powerfull way to generate templates.

A template is a text file that can generate any text based format like HTML, XML. It is used to express presentation and not programm logic.

You can use templates to create a layout. You can create a base layout and the overwrite or append any of your layout blocks with individual templates.

Read more about Templates in Mapbender at How to create your own Template?.

Documentation

If you want to know more about twig check out the documentation under http://twig.sensiolabs.org . You find a good introduction in the Symfony documentation Creating and using Templates http://symfony.com/doc/current/templating.html

Twig Syntax

{# define a comment like this #}

{{ mb_user }}      {# echo a variable #}

{%    %}           {# do something if, for #}

{{ mb_user|upper }}   {# use filter #}

{{title|trans }}   {# translates the variable title #}
{% trans %}title{% endtrans %}

Twig Template caching

Twig is fast and the twig template is compiled to a native PHP class at runtime.

You find the compiled classes at

app/cache/dev/twig # when running in the development mode

or

app/cache/prod/twig # when running in the productive mode

Notice: The files are cached in the productive mode. In the debug mode, the Twig template will be automatically recompiled.

Template Location

Templates can be located at

  • app/Resources/views/

  • <path bundle>/Resources/views/

Template Name

The name of your template should follows the syntax bundle:controller:template.

In Mapbender we use for example the following twig templates:

  • app/base.html.twig

  • application/mapbender/src/Mapbender/CoreBundle/Resources/views/frontend.html.twig

  • application/mapbender/src/Mapbender/CoreBundle/Resources/views/Template/fullscreen.html.twig

Check the syntax of your Twig template

You can check for syntax errors in Twig templates using the twig:lint console command:

app/console twig:lint mapbender/src/Mapbender/CoreBundle/Resources/views/Template/fullscreen.html.twig

The example checks by filename, but you could also check by directory or bundle name.