Headers

The page headers (alternatively known as frontmatter) at the top of a page are completely optional, you do not need them at all for a page to display within Grav. There are 3 primary types of pages (Standard, Listing, and Modular) within Grav, and each has relevant headers.

Basic Page Headers

There are a number of basic header options available.

Cache Enable

cache_enable: false

By default, Grav will cache the contents of the page file to ensure things run as fast as possible. There are advanced scenarios where you do not want the page to be cached.

An example of this is when you are using dynamic Twig variables in your content. The cache_enable variable allows this behavior to be overridden. We will cover Twig Content variables in a later chapter. Valid values are true or false.

Date

date: 01/01/2020 3:14pm

The date variable allows you to specifically set a date associated with this page. This is often used to indicate when a post was created and can be used for display or sort-order purposes. If not set, this defaults to the last modified time of the page.

Menu

menu: My Page

The menu variable lets you set the text to be used in the navigation. There are several layers of fall-backs for the menu, so if no menu variable is set, Grav will try to use the title variable.

Published

published: true

By default, a page is published unless you explicitly set published: false or via a publish_date being in the future, or unpublish_date in the past. Valid values are true or false.

Slug

slug: my-page-slug

The slug variable allows you to specifically set the page's portion of the URL. For example: http://yoursite.com/my-page-slug would be the URL if you set the slug above. If the slug is not set in the page, Grav falls back to using the folder name (without any numerical prefixes).

Slugs are generally entirely lowercase, with accented characters replaced by letters from the English alphabet and whitespace characters replaced by a dash or an underscore. While future versions of Grav will support spaces in slugs, having blank spaces or capital lettering is not recommended.

For example: If a blog post's title is Blog Post Example, the recommended slug would be blog-post-example.

Taxonomy

taxonomy:
    category: blog
    tag: [sample, demo, grav]

A very useful header variable, taxonomy lets you assign values to taxonomy you defined as valid types in the Site Configuration file.

If the taxonomy is not defined in that file, it will be ignored. In this example, the page is defined as being in the blog category, and has the tags: sample, demo, and grav. These taxonomies can be used to find these pages from other pages, plugins and even themes. The Taxonomy chapter will cover this concept in more detail.

Title

If you have no headers at all, you will not have any control over the title of the page as it shows in the browser and search engines. For this reason, it is recommended to at least put the title variable in the header of the page:

title: Title of my Page

If the title variable is not set, Grav has a fallback solution, and will try to use the capitalized slug variable.