# Templates
Templates contain the HTML for your pages, spiced up with some PHP to dynamically pull in your content.
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(screencast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmz6NYUNWPk title: Your first template text: Connect the content from your content folder with your static HTML and bring your pages to life.)
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## TL;DR
- All templates are stored in the `/site/templates` folder
- To create a new template for a page, create a .php file with a filename that matches the filename of the content file
- You can use the `$page`, `$site` and `$pages` variables to easily access the content of your pages/site
## Naming your templates
When you open a page in the browser, Kirby reads the name of the text file to determine what template to use to render the page. If Kirby finds a template with the same name as the text file, it loads it and executes the code contained in it. If there is no matching template, the default template is used instead.
Here are some example of content file and template file counterparts:
| Text file | Template |
| - | - |
| /content/home/home.txt | /site/templates/home.php |
| /content/projects/projects.txt | /site/templates/projects.php |
| /content/projects/project-1/project.txt | /site/templates/project.php |
| /content/projects/project-2/project.txt | /site/templates/project.php |
Template names must be lowercase, for example `default.php` or `blog.php`.
### The default template
The default template is the only required template. It is called `default.php` and must exist in your `/site/templates` folder. When you get started with a completely new site you might want to start with just the default template as your foundation.
### Shared templates
Pages with the same or a similar content structure can share a single template. For example, all the notes subpages in the `/notes` page or the album subpages of the `/photography` page of the Starterkit share the same template called `note.php` and `album.php` respectively.
## Basic usage
Let's start with looking at a very simple HTML template and how we can replace parts of it with the content of our text files.
```html
My first page
Hello world!
```
Nothing very special here, just a static HTML page with a title tag in the head and a headline in the body.
Kirby provides some API variables for each template that are instantly available and allow us to fetch content from our pages, namely the `$site`, the `$page` and the `$pages` variables.
## The `$site` variable
The `$site` object contains important information about the site in general and the data stored in `/content/site.txt`. Let's replace the hard-coded document title with something more dynamic:
```php
<?= $site->title()->html() ?>
Hello world!
```
With `$site->title()` we fetch the value of the title field from `/content/site.txt`.
The `site.txt` file of the Starterkit looks like this:
```kirbycontent "/content/site.txt"
Title: Kirby Starterkit
----
Author: Content Folder GmbH & Co. KG
----
Description: This is Kirby's Starterkit.
----
Copyright: © 2009–2026 The Kirby Team
```
The above code would therefore render "Kirby Starterkit" as our document title.
The `$site` object is the perfect place for storing any data that you want to reuse throughout your site. Next to typical things like data for the title and description meta tags, you can also store copyright information or social media accounts.
All this data can be used in your templates instantly:
```php
<?= $site->title()->html() ?>
Hello world!
```
As you can see, the `$site` object also contains the main URL of your site, which can be used to link the logo back to your homepage for example. The `$site` object has many more methods you can find in the Reference.
## The `$page` variable
The `$page` object is probably the variable you will use the most throughout your templates. `$page` always refers to the currently active page.
Like the `$site` variable, the `$page` variable has many methods that allow us to get information from the page. You can find all available methods in the Reference.
```php
<?= $page->title()->html() ?> | <?= $site->title()->html() ?>
title()->html() ?>
text()->kirbytext() ?>
```
The document title and the main container of the page are now completed with data from the currently visited page.
With
```php
title() ?>
```
we fetch the title of the page and with
```php
text() ?>
```
we get the data from the text field of the page. The `html()` field method is used to escape content.
All fields we added to our page content files are accessible like this.
Fieldnames are converted to lowercase and any punctuation is replaced with underscores as PHP does not support special characters in method names.
PHP may swallow a newline if a printed variable like `` is placed at the end of a line. This can also affect regular templates, so don't rely on an end-of-line `` alone when a preserved line break is important.
## Reserved words
If you use field names in your text file, which are also used by native Kirby methods, e.g. "image", "videos", "audio", or "num", you cannot fetch the data like described above. To fetch the content of such fields, you have to use the `content()` method:
| Field name | Variable |
| - | - |
| `Image:` | `$page->content()->image()` |
| `Videos:` | `$page->content()->videos()` |
| `Audio:` | `$page->content()->audio()` |
## Response types
In your templates, you can set different response types depending on content.
For example, to send an `application/json` response:
```php
response()->json();
echo json_encode(['your' => 'data']);
```
You can also send other response types by extension or MIME type:
```php
response()->type('txt');
$kirby->response()->type('text/plain');
```
The `$kirby->response()` object provides several other methods to customize the response (e.g. caching, HTTP headers and the HTTP status code). Learn more in the reference ›
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## More information
- [Custom post types](https://getkirby.com/docs/cookbook/content-structure/custom-post-types.md)
- [PHP templating](https://getkirby.com/docs/cookbook/php/php-templates.md)
- [Basic error hunting & prevention](https://getkirby.com/docs/cookbook/php/debugging-basics.md)
- [One-pager](https://getkirby.com/docs/cookbook/content-structure/one-pager.md)