ContentTypes / Introduction

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All content in Bolt is stored in the database in a logical and flexible fashion. In general, when you're building a website, you have an idea what kind of content you're going to be managing with the website. Most websites have some sort of 'pages' for generic stuff like 'about us' or 'Company History'.

Most websites will also have some form of news-like items, that are shown based on the date that they were published. Some other sites might have 'book reviews' or 'event dates' or even completely different content. All of these different types of content are called ContentTypes in Bolt, and you can add as many different ContentTypes as you need.

Each ContentType is made up of Fields, you can read more about Fields and what fields are available in the Fields Definition section.

All content on your website is part of one specific ContentType, which automatically defines which fields that piece of content has, which in turn specifies how that piece of content is structured. Each one of those pieces of content is called a Record, and is stored in the database. For example, a single 'event' is a Record of ContentType 'events' and a single 'page' is a Record of ContentType 'pages'.

When you're creating a page on a website that shows listings of several Records, you're using an Array of Records. For instance, if you create a page that has 'the five latest events', you'll be using an Array of 5 'event' Records of ContentType 'events'.

Before we dive into the details, we'll give you a quick example of a simple ContentType, how it's stored, and how you can access it in templates to display on your site.

An Example: News items¶

In this example, we'll create a very simple ContentType for news items. Each news item will have a title, a photo, and some text. We'll also be using some of the fixed Fields, like the slug, the ownerid and the various dates.

To add this ContentType, edit the file config/bolt/contenttypes.yaml, and add the following to the bottom or top of the file:

news:
    name: News
    singular_name: News Item
    fields:
        title:
            type: text
            class: large
        slug:
            type: slug
            uses: title
        photo:
            type: image
        text:
            type: html
            height: 300px
    record_template: newsitem.twig

Tip: This file is in the YAML format, which means that the indentation is important. Make sure you leave leading spaces intact.

This creates a new ContentType 'news'. Its name is 'News', and a single record is named 'News Item'. We've defined fields for 'title', 'slug', 'photo' and 'text'. The 'record_template' defines the default template to use, when displaying a single record in the browser.

Note: You should always ensure that the key that defines each of the ContentTypes and the value of the name are the same. In the above example, we start with the key news:, and the name is set to name: News. If these do not match, Bolt will show an error message.

Save the file and refresh the Dashboard screen in your browser. If you do this, you'll see your new ContentType in the sidebar, ready for use. Sweet!

Note: In the following examples we're going to tell you to make modifications to the default `base-2021` theme. This is actually a very bad practice, because future updates of Bolt will override any changes made to that theme. If you're going to make your own theme, make a copy of the `base-2021` theme, and do your modifications in the copy.

To add a listing of these news items to the website, edit the twig template theme/base-2021/index.twig. Most likely, it'll contain an include for a header and some other things. Add the following to the HTML-code, preferably somewhere below the header section:

{% setcontent newsitems = "news" latest limit 4 %}

{% for newsitem in newsitems %}
    <article>
        <h2><a href="{{ newsitem|link }}">{{ newsitem.title }}</a></h2>

        {{ newsitem|excerpt }}

        <p class="meta"><a href="{{ newsitem|link }}">Link</a> -
            Posted by {{ newsitem.author.displayname }}
            on {{ newsitem.createdAt|date("M d, ’y")}}</p>

        </article>
{% endfor %}

Most of the above example will seem pretty straightforward, but all of the specific template tags are explained in detail in the chapter about Content in templates.

When you refresh the front page of the website, you should see four news items listed on the page. You can click the title to go to the news item on a separate page, but it will use the default record.twig template. In the ContentType we defined the template as newsitem.twig, but it doesn't exist. Create the file in the theme/base-2021/ folder, and add the following HTML-code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <title>{{ newsitem.title }}</title>
</head>

<body>

    <article>

        <h1><a href="{{ newsitem|link }}">{{ newsitem.title }}</a></h1>

        {% if newsitem.photo is not empty %}
            <div class='imageholder'><img src="{{ newsitem.image|thumbnail(480, 480) }}"></div>
        {% endif %}

        {{ newsitem.text }}

        <p class="meta"><a href="{{ newsitem|link }}">Link</a> -
            Posted by {{ newsitem.author.displayname }}
            on {{ newsitem.createdAt|date("M d, ’y")}}</p>

    </article>
</body>
</html>

Tip: If you're curious about the different {{ tags }} in this bit of code, read the Template documentation.

In the frontend of the website, in your templates, all content is accessible as an array. If you're accessing one record, it will be an array containing the fields, taxonomies and metadata. If you're accessing a set of records, it will be an array of arrays. I.e. {{ page.title }} for the title of a page or {{ events.3.date }} for the date of the fourth event in an array.

Tip: Although it's possible to access an array of records by its index number, this is not used very often in practice. It's much more common to use a loop like {% for event in events %}, to iterate over all of the events, and then use them separately as a single event.

If you're building a template and are unsure of what a certain variable contains or how the fields are named, use {{ dump(foo) }}, where 'foo' is the name of your record or array.

This is explained in detail in the section The structure of a Record.

Defining ContentTypes¶

ContentTypes in Bolt are defined in the file config/bolt/contenttypes.yaml. You can edit this file directly, or from within the Bolt interface under Configuration > ContentTypes. Each distinct group of content can have its own ContentType, to enable the user to store the content as needed. Fields can be added later on, and settings can be changed, so nothing is set in stone.

The general structure of each ContentType is:

name:
    option: value
    option: value
    option: value
    ..

The name defines the name of the ContentType, and it should be a 'safe' version of the name: option below. Basically this means that it should be a lowercase version, without any special characters. Spaces should be replaced by hyphens. Like this:

pages:
    name: Pages
    singular_name: Page
    ..

cafes:
    name: Cafés
    singular_name: Café
    ..

blog-posts:
    name: "Blog Posts"
    singular_name: "Blog Post"
    ..

The available options are:

Automatic titles versus title_format¶

As you might have noticed in the screenshots above or in the Bolt backend itself, Records in listing overviews and in the "Recently edited" panel are always shown with a linked title. Even if the ContentType does not actually have a field named title, Bolt will make a reasonable assumption as to what the "Title" should be. By using title_format you can override this, if Bolt doesn't provide correct titles for a ContentType.

title_format and excerpt_format¶

The title_format and excerpt_format options both support all fields defined in the content type, the author, status and id of the record. For example:

pages:
    name: Pages
    singular_name: Page
    title_format: "{id} ({status}): {title}" # e.g. "35 (published): About us
    excerpt_format: "{author}: {content}" # e.g. John Doe: Whole content until character limit...
    fields:
        title:
            type: text
        content:
            type: html

Singleton ContentTypes¶

You can set the option to create a Singleton ContentType, which basically is a ContentType that only contains exactly one record. For example, you can create a Singleton where you can store the site's social media links and basic contact info, that you can then use globally in your templates. Another common usecase is for a logical place to put the "Homepage" content.

More details and examples can be found in Making a Singleton ContentType.

Grouping ContentTypes in the sidebar¶

If you have a larger number of ContentTypes, the sidebar in Bolt's backend might look too cluttered. To make your the sidebar tidier, you can group several ContentTypes together in the sidebar menu, using the show_in_menu option.

For example:

entries:
    name: Entries
    …
    show_in_menu: false

showcases:
    name: Showcases
    …
    show_in_menu: false

The result of this example, is shown in the following screenshot:

Tip: If you provide a name, like show_in_menu: Foo, then that name will be used, instead of the generic "Other content" label.

The structure of a Record¶

Every record is an object, that contains the information of that record, as well as some meta-information and its taxonomy.

At the topmost level, it contains the following items:

The object also contains a generic getter for a record field values. Fetch the value using {{ record.field_name }}. If the field_name is not found, it throws an exception if it's invoked from code, and returns null if invoked from within a twig template. (In templates we need to be more lenient, in order to do things like {% if record.foo %}..{% endif %}. Note: We can not rely on {% if record.foo is defined %}, because it always returns true for object properties.)

There is also a variety of built-in twig helper filters and functions to get various pieces of record data.

If you're building a template and are unsure of what a certain variable contains or how the fields are named, use {{ dump(foo) }}, where 'foo' is the name of your record or array. In most templates, {{ dump(record) }} will work as a generic fallback for whatever the name of your record is.

Advanced: YAML Repeated Nodes¶

In order to make your ContentType definitions more compact, and consistent, you can use YAML repeated nodes. Bolt has a special YAML key called __nodes that it will use only for repeated nodes, and not create a ContentType or table for. These nodes then become selectable in a ContentType definition.

Each node is defined by an key_name: &node_name with the fields then included, and indented below.

## Defaults nodes. Does not create a ContentType
__nodes:
    record_defaults: &record_defaults
        title:
            type: text
            class: large
            group: main
        slug:
            type: slug
            uses: title
    content_defaults: &content_defaults
        image:
            type: image
            alt: true
        body:
            type: html
            height: 300px
            group: content
    template_defaults: &template_defaults
        template:
            type: templateselect
            filter: '*.twig'
            group: meta

In the above example, we have the record_defaults node that defines title and slug fields, a content_defaults node that defines the image and body fields, and a template_defaults node that defines our template selector.

Using the above nodes we could simplify a default Pages ContentType to look like this:

pages:
    name: Pages
    singular_name: Page
    fields:
        <<: *record_defaults
        teaser:
            type: html
            height: 150px
        <<: *content_defaults
        <<: *template_defaults
    taxonomy: [ chapters ]
    recordsperpage: 100

Keeping fields together in a group¶

If you have defined groups in a YAML repeated node, you can add a field from a specific ContentType to one of these groups.

In the example below, the slider field will appear in the tab media.

Example:

__nodes:
    record_defaults: &record_defaults
        title:
            type: text
            class: large
            group: main
        slug:
            type: slug
            uses: title
    content_defaults: &content_defaults
        image:
            type: image
            group: media
(...)

pages:
    name: Pages
    singular_name: Page
    fields:
        <<: *record_defaults
        slider:
            type: imagelist
            group: media
(...)