The Skills List Page + A Grid of Skills

Thanks to the Contentful integration, in addition to our doctrine_recipe value type, we now have a second value type that can load things from Contentful. This means that we can render lists and grids of skills inside any layout, like over here on our homepage.

Let's try it! Publish this layout... then edit the Homepage Layout. Oh, and we can delete this old grid we were playing with earlier.

Below, we're currently rendering the featured_skills Twig block. But in reality, if you looked at our template, those are totally hardcoded!

Adding A Grid of Skills

No problem! Add a Grid block... which is already set it to a "Manual Collection". But check this out! We can now choose between manually selecting "Contentful entries" or recipes! And when we click "Add Items", the content browser already works!

Select a few of these... good... then publish this. Refresh. Um... ok! They do render... but just the title. Good start. To make this a tiny bit better, go to the "Design" tab... and wrap this in a container.

That should, at least, give us some gutters. There we go. Ultimately, we want these to render like the hardcoded skills below them. And we're going to work on that in a few minutes.

Adding a /skills Page

But before we get there, what about a /skills page that lists all of the skills? Well, the Contentful integration did not give us this URL. But, no problem! We can create it ourselves in Symfony!

Well, actually, we could do this entirely in Contentful! We could create a "Page" content type, create a "Skills" page, which could become /skills, then map that to a Layout. This is the type of thing you'd normally do when you have a CMS at your fingertips

But we'll create this page the manual way. After all, Layouts is really about helping organize how existing pages look... it's not really about adding dynamic pages. That's a job for a CMS.

In your editor, open up src/Controller/MainController.php. Copy the homepage() action, paste, change to /skills, call it app_skills and rename the method to skills(). For the template, render main/skills.html.twig:

Now, in the templates/main/ directory, create that: skills.html.twig. Let's start with the smallest possible thing: extend nglayouts.layoutTemplate:

Cool. While we're here, open base.html.twig and link to this. Search for "Skills". There's the link. Set the href to {{ path('app_skills') }}:

I like it! Refresh, try the link in the header and... the page works!

Adding Content Manually?

To put content onto this page, we could also do that manually by writing code in our app! The Contentful library we installed earlier has a ClientInterface service that we could use to fetch all of these skills from Contentful in our controller.

But instead, let's take the easy way out and let layouts fetch the skills for us. Oh, but before we do that, back in skills.html.twig, add a {% block title %}, write "All Skills" and then {% endblock %}:

This, as you probably know, controls the page's title. I'm doing this here because the title block is actually not something you can control via Layouts. Remember: everything we build in our layout becomes part of a block called layout.

Adding the Skill List Layout

Ok, hit "Publish" on the Homepage Layout... and then create a new layout. I'll use my favorite "Layout 2" and call it "Skills List Layout".

You know the drill. Start by linking the header zone... and the footer zone. Then, let's build another hero. Add a column, give it a hero-wrapper class, then put a "Title" block inside with "All Skills". To be even cooler, add a text block below with some intro content.

Nice start! Publish the layout... so we can go link it to the /skills page. Hit "Add New Mapping" and link this to the "Skills List Layout". Then go to Details. This time I'll map via the Path Info, set to /skills. Hit save changes.

Let's go see how our first attempt looks. And... not bad!

Adding the Skills Grid

Now let's add the important stuff. Head back to the layouts admin and edit this layout.

Below the column, add a new Grid. Change this from a manual collection to a dynamic collection. The Contentful package gives us two new "query types", or ways to "fetch" data from Contentful. Use "Contentful Search". That's the main one.

This allows you to choose which content types to show, like all of them... or just skills. We can then sort them, add a search, skip items or limit them. It's everything we want, out-of-the-box!

What does it look like? Hit "Publish". I bet you can guess. Yup! It "works"... by printing out the title of each skill. Oh, let me at least add that "container" class... to get the left and right margin.

But, this is obviously not what we want! We need to be able to style this and print out more fields than just the title. We have the same problem on the homepage.

And actually, this is even more complex than it seems! When we customize how a grid of skills renders, I want to be able to make those items look one way on the homepage, and a different way on the "Skills" page, probably larger and with more fields printed.

Next: let's start learning the very important topic of how we can override and customize the templates from Layouts so that we can make things look exactly like we want.