Kirby's PHP API

Key objects

All the classes

There are a lot more classes and objects at play within Kirby. You can find the most common ones in the Reference:

• All classes
• Class aliases

Access to other pages

On the previous guide pages, we showed you how to access content from the current page with $page and from the site with $site. You are not limited to these two sources. The $site and $pages objects also allow you to access the content of any page:

<section class="about-us">
  <?= $pages->get('about')->text()->kirbytext() ?>
</section>

The $pages->get() method returns a page by its ID, meaning its folder path in the content folder.

Kirby also provides the $pages->find() method. In addition to the page ID, it also supports the page URI in the current language (if the page slug was translated) and it automatically handles URIs of content representations. So if you know that you are passing the untranslated page ID, $pages->get() will get you the page as fast as possible. If you need more leeway, $pages->find() will be more resilient, but slightly slower.

Another alternative is the $pages->findBy() method. It allows you to query a page by a specific property inside a collection:

<section class="news">
  <?= $page->children()->findBy('slug', 'news')->text()->kirbytext() ?>
</section>

In this example, the slug is queried, which is the last part of the page ID. So if the current $page has the ID path/to/page, the resulting page is path/to/page/news.

Permissions

Some parts of Kirby's PHP API only work if you are logged in (or authenticated in other ways), because they respect the permissions of the currently logged in user. E.g. users cannot update a page via $page->update(), unless they are logged in and have adequate permissions. This helps increase the security of your code by blocking operations for unauthorized users.

You can read more about available user permissions as well as how to authenticate or impersonate in the Users permissions docs ›

Immutable objects

Many methods of Kirby objects do not return a string, integer or similar but a Kirby object of the same type. For example, $page->update() is a method applied to an object of Kirby\Cms\Page and also returns an object of Kirby\Cms\Page.

However, it is important to know that most often Kirby's objects are immutable. That means, when you modify an object like $page, $file etc. using a method like update(), changeTitle() and so on, a new (cloned) object with changes applied is returned.

Therefore, you have to store the returned object in a new variable to be able to further work with it. Or if you want to continue using the existing object with these new changes, you need to reassign the returned object to the existing variable:

// $project would still have the old value
$project = page('project/project-a');
$project->update(['year' => 2014]);

// $project has the new value after reassigning
$project = page('project/project-a');
$project = $project->update(['year' => 2014]);

Some methods can return both, $this (the same instance you were calling) and a cloned object (static or self). In the reference, this case is marked with "$this|static" as the return value in the doc block for the method. $this is returned whenever the object wasn't changed (e.g. values remained the same), while a cloned object is returned when the data changed - to keep the original object immutable. Most times, this difference will not affect your code if you always store the return value in a variable and continue working with that variable as explained above.