devot:eeDevoted to ExpressionEngine

Template Variables That Work

Having an embedded template that contains your webpage doctype, opening html tag, head content, and maybe the header of your site is very common and useful. It’s nice to be able to change that stuff in one place and have it change everywhere on the website. Unfortunately it can be very frustrating to pass page titles and meta descriptions to this embedded template on even moderately complex sites. Having to wrap your embed tag with a weblog/channel entries tag so you can pass parameters to the template is awkward at best, and it just gets worse from there.

The string plugin greatly simplifies this task… just build the variable wherever it’s most natural in the main template (where you’ll have your entries tag open anyway) and call on that value from the embedded template.  String variable values can be tested with EE conditionals, too!

One Plugin, Many Uses

This plugin has been used successfully to do many things:

• page title, meta description, and canonical link tags
• retrieving the parent’s title within a related_entries/reverse_related_entries block
• relocating pagination to somewhere else in the template
• building breadcrumbs to display at the top of the page
• passing values from input mode PHP to EE template tags

Check out the code examples to see some of the ways this plugin can make your life easier.

Mmmm Dog Food

We used the string plugin extensively on our own site. It’s used for our page titles, meta descriptions, the breadcrumbs, canonical link tags, even some sidebar content.  Come have a look to see what it can do for you. We’re convinced that we’ve only scratched the surface of what can be done with this plugin. If you have a particularly clever use, we’d love to hear about it.