WordPress Timber View Controller

If you're like me and hate writing 2 files to render a twig template for WordPress (e.g. page.php for context and page.twig for markup) then this library is for you. It follows the WordPress Template Hierarchy so you can also create files such as single-{post_type}.twig.

How to use

Using wp-timber-view-controller is easy.

composer require aaronkirkham/wp-timber-view-controller

Then place the following code inside your themes functions.php:

require_once( __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php' );

new Timber\Timber;
new Timber\ViewController;

and that's it. Your Twig templates will be automatically rendered.

This library uses the internal Timber::$dirname variable to locate your templates (default folder is views). If you want your files to live in a different folder, you must overwrite this.

// look inside /templates/ instead of /views/
Timber::$dirname = 'templates';

If you need to add variables to the Timber context, there are handy filters available for that.

Filter: timber_context--%TEMPLATE%

The timber_context--%TEMPLATE% filter (where %TEMPLATE% is the current template name) is fired when the specific template is rendered. This is handy if you want to get posts from WordPress on specific pages.

add_filter( 'timber_context--404', function( $ctx ) {
  $ctx['message'] = '404 - Not Found';
  return $ctx;
});

add_filter( 'timber_context--single', function( $ctx ) {
  $ctx['post'] = new \Timber\Post();
  return $ctx;
});

In the above examples, the message variable will be available on all pages which are rendered using the 404.twig template, and the post variable will be available on all single.twig templates.

FYI

If you want to add data into the context for every template, you should use the timber_context filter which is fired by Timber.

add_filter( 'timber_context', function( $ctx ) {
  $ctx['foo'] = 'bar';
  return $ctx;
});

The variable foo is now available on all templates.

White screen?

If your twig templates are not rendered or you just have a white screen, you should turn on WP_DEBUG inside wp-config.php to view a hierarchical list of templates that wp-timber-view-controller tried to render. Double check the displayed template path and file names are correct.