In Craft, you define your site’s HTML output with templates.
Templates are files that live within your craft/templates folder. The structure of your templates is completely up to you – you can put templates at the root of that folder, within subdirectories, or within subdirectories’ subdirectories (and on and on). Whatever works for your site’s needs.
Craft uses Twig to parse your templates. Twig is elegant, powerful, and blazing fast. If you’re new to Twig, be sure to read through our {entry:docs/twig-primer:link} to familiarize yourself with its syntax.
PHP code isn’t allowed in your templates. If you have a need to do something that is not possible out-of-the-box with Craft or Twig, you can create a plugin that provides a new template variable.
There are several times when you’ll need to enter a path to one of your templates:
- When choosing which template entry and category URLs should load
- When assigning a template to a route
- Within
{% include %}
,{% extends %}
, and{% embed %}
template tags
Craft has a standard template path format that applies to each of these cases: a Unix-style file system path to the template file, relative from your craft/templates
directory.
For example, if you have a template located at craft/templates/recipes/entry.html
, the following template paths would point to it:
recipes/entry
recipes/entry.html
If you name your template index.html
, you don’t need to specify it in the template path.
For example, if you have a template located at craft/templates/recipes/ingredients/index.html
, the following template paths would point to it:
recipes/ingredients
recipes/ingredients/index
recipes/ingredients/index.html
If you have templates located at both craft/templates/recipes/ingredients.html
and craft/templates/recipes/ingredients/index.html
, the template path recipes/ingredients
will match ingredients.html
.
Hidden Templates
Craft treats templates with names prefixed with an underscore, for example recipes/_entry.html
, as hidden templates that are not directly accessible.
If we have a recipe entry that is available at the entry URL http://mysite.com/recipes/gin-tonic
, which uses the template located at recipes/entry
, someone could access the template directly at http://mysite.com/recipes/entry
.
In this example there is no reason to access the template directly because it's only ever used as part of an entry URL. We change its file name to _entry.html
so it is considered hidden by Craft and update the settings in our Section.
Now when we try to access http://mysite.com/recipes/entry
Craft returns a 404 error instead of attempting to render the template.
If you’re running multiple sites with Craft, you can create site-specific subdirectories in your craft/templates/
directory, which contain templates that will only be available to a specific site.
For example, if you want to create a special template welcoming your German customers, but there’s no need for it on your English site, then you could save it in craft/templates/de/welcome.html
. That template would be available from http://example.de/welcome.
Craft will look for localized templates before it looks for templates in the normal location, so you can use them to override non-localized templates. See our Localization Guide for more details.