Structured content

Kirby's content fields can contain any plain text format. But that does not have to be one-dimensional data like a title or some text. One way to further structure plain text is called YAML - a human-readable data structure syntax.

With the help of YAML our content can be even more powerful.

Example: nice addresses

If you are building a contact page and you've got just one address, so far you could simply structure the content like this for example…

Title: Contact
----
Street: 15 Sesamestreet
----
ZIP: 9210
----
City: New York
----
Phone: 500-12131
----
Email: myawesome@email.com

But what happens, when you got more than just one address? Maybe your company has various offices all around the world or you are just very rich and you want to show off with the addresses of your houses on the Bahamas, New York, LA and in Monaco.

One way would be to add subpages for each address and then build a foreach loop with $page->children() to display each address. But that would be quite an oversized solution for just showing more than one address.

You could also add multiple fields like this:

Street_a: 15 Sesamestreet
----
ZIP_a: 9210
----
City_a: New York
----
Phone_a: 500-12131
----
Street_b: Rue de WTF 17
----
ZIP_b: 1112
----
City_b: Monaco
----
Phone_b: 555-1234

But that wouldn't be very easy to read and maintain.

With YAML syntax you can add more than just one address in one single field:

Monaco:
  Street: Rue de WTF 17
  ZIP:    1112
  City:   Monaco
  Phone:  555-1234
  Email:  me@monaco.org

NewYork:
  Street: 1212 Broadway
  ZIP:    4321
  City:   New York
  Phone:  666-4321
  Email:  me@ny.org

Bahamas:
  Street: At the beach
  ZIP:    9999
  City:   The capitol of the Bahamas
  Phone:  777-9999
  Email:  me@bahamas.org

Looks pretty tidy, right? To see the full potential of YAML syntax, check out the YAML site or the YAML Wikipedia entry

How to access data

In your template you can parse YAML in content fields with the yaml method:

<?php $addresses = $page->addresses()->yaml() ?>

This will give you a nice associative array:

Array
(
    [Monaco] => Array
        (
            [Street] => Rue de WTF 17
            [ZIP] => 1112
            [City] => Monaco
            [Phone] => 555-1234
            [Email] => me@monaco.org
        )

    [NewYork] => Array
        (
            [Street] => 1212 Broadway
            [ZIP] => 4321
            [City] => New York
            [Phone] => 666-4321
            [Email] => me@ny.org
        )

    [Bahamas] => Array
        (
            [Street] => At the beach
            [ZIP] => 9999
            [City] => The capitol of the Bahamas
            [Phone] => 777-9999
            [Email] => me@bahamas.org
        )

)

Hint: Use dump($array) to inspect the content of any array or object.

toStructure()

Working with such an array is not difficult, but we can add more Kirby flavor to it, to keep the template syntax more in line with the rest of our APIs.

The toStructure method parses the YAML content and converts it into a nice Kirby-style object.

<?php foreach ($page->addresses()->toStructure() as $address): ?>
<div class="address">

  <?= $address->street() ?><br />
  <?= $address->zip() ?> <?= $address->city() ?>

  …

</div>
<?php endforeach ?>

This works also great in connection with Microformats

More ideas

As you can see this will give you a lot more control and structure for your content. It's not limited to addresses though:

A list of profiles

Mastodon:
  Username: "@bastianallgeier@mastodon.social"
  Link:     https://mastodon.social/@bastianallgeier
Zootool:
  Username: bastian
  Link:     http://zootool.com/bastian
Dribbble:
  Username: bastianallgeier
  Link:     http://dribbble.com/bastianallgeier

Your Team Members

Peter:
  Name:    Peter Appleseed
  Email:   peter@peterpaulmary.com
  Phone:   555-1234
  Hobbies: Reading, Writing, Horses, Swimming

Paul:
  Name:    Paul Appleseed
  Email:   paul@peterpaulmary.com
  Phone:   555-1234
  Hobbies: Reading, Writing, Horses, Swimming

Mary:
  Name:    Mary Appleseed
  Email:   mary@peterpaulmary.com
  Phone:   555-1234
  Hobbies: Reading, Writing, Horses, Swimming

…or whatever structured data you need!