Select Variable

FKAP

Hi mad,
Thanks for all your work – automad is just simply brilliant … and all the attention to detail clearly shows the architect behind it!

I've started to work on a theme based on the equally nice halfmoon-css framework (I’ll gladly share if it leads anywhere). With a little more time now over the holidays I might come up with a few more questions. But off we go with the first – although based on what I’ve seen in the docs it might be a feature request:
Both for content creation, as well as backend options, it would be really nice to have an additional page-variable offering (to be manually defined or dynamically filtered) options as a select or even multi-select.
For content, one could imagine selecting categories based on a list of existing pages, selecting pre-defined types of work or locations and so forth.
In the backend I would like to offer some predefined (mutually exclusive) theme-options. At the moment I’m using two checkbox-type variables for this – which works, but isn’t really "either this … or that"

I hope, I’ve been able the describe what I had in mind. I think, this might be a rather flexible addition. The select-values being held in an array could even be reused and iterated over in other contexts.
Or maybe this is possible already / somehow and I've just not seen it?

Thanks and best regards,
Florian

mad

FKAP Hi Florian, yeah that would indeed be very useful. So far it hasn't been implemented because the existing variable types don't require any configuration outside the templates. They just get picked up as they are. However select variables would need a more complex structure behind to allow for defining a list of possible values somewhere — for example in the theme.json file. But it is not impossible of course. I think it would be a great feature in one of the future versions.

FKAP

Hi again,
Yes, I can see your point regarding the necessary configuration of select-variables. In addition, it's probably also a design-thing, as contrary to regular-text variables, a "select" has a different representation (the select-field) than it's input method (a number of separated values).
It would share some similarity with the +block though, which allows for a number of different inputs. Maybe a select-variable should be a specific block which allows to enter an arbitrary number of option:value pairs.
I would prefer this over a configuration in theme.json as it would be user-editable.
Of course: the option of pre-setting values within atheme.json would be nice as well, so maybe both options should be offered. Maybe something like { … | def (option:value, option:value) } or { … | def ( @{../settings/select.php} ) }
Some half-related follow-up questions:

Is it possible to iterate over the contents of a +block? To get each entry and do something with it in a loop? I'd like use a +block in my site and at certain breakpoints split the text up. (Iterating over a block would of course also be necessary if a select-variable would be implemented this way.)
How do you – respectively can you – set default-values for variables to be used in themes? I'm trying @{ background-color | def ('255,255,255') }. But that doesn't seem to show up in the dashboard (it works though)

Finally: I've seen that you started on a halfmoon-theme! That's great. Next to the dark-mode I really like that it uses custom-properties extensively over pre-processed css … which of course led to the whole "select-variable-would-be-really-nice" ;-) I'm looking forward to your implementation. Mine is quite specific design-wise at the moment … but maybe I'll come arround to make it more general at some point.

Best, Florian

mad

FKAP Hi, regarding blocks, it is indeed possible to iterate blocks using the PHP API inside a template. Blocks are stored in a JSON string and therefore can be easily converted into a PHP array. The Revitron theme does exactly that to create the sub navigation based on header blocks. In a template you can basically do the following:

<?php

$Page = $Automad->Context->get();
$main = json_decode($Page->get('+main'));

// Just print the blocks array to get an idea of the content ...
print_r($main);

// Or simply iterate it ...
foreach($main->blocks as $block) {
    ...
}

?>

Note that you can mix PHP and the Automad template language in one template file. But in general it is better practice to move the PHP part to its own snippet file and then just include it like <@ snippet.php @> when it is needed to avoid issues with the order of parsing.

FKAP

Thanks a lot!! The pointer to the Revitron theme is really helpful!