Templates

Templates define the HTML structure of your website and allow you to change its presentation and style. Tota uses the Mustache templating language, which works by substituting variable placeholders for real data.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <title>{{title}}</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello, {{name}}!</h1>
  </body>
</html>

Directory

Templates are written in Mustache (.mustache) format and stored in the templates directory. Tota will insert the page content into the templates when generating the HTML files.


Lookup order

Tota follows a pre-defined strategy to resolve which template to use, starting from the most specific and following a series of fallback templates.

An explicit template declaration in the front matter takes the highest order of precedence.

---
title: "Parrots and Cockatoos"
template: "birds.mustache"
---

If no template can be found, Tota will fallback to either pages.mustache or posts.mustache, depending on the type of page being generated. Note that changing the pages/posts directory names in configuration will have an effect on this lookup.

Finally, Tota will try to resolve base.mustache before throwing an error.


Partials

Partials are small snippets of reusable code, useful to share components between templates. Common examples include headers, footers, navbars and sidebars. They are stored in a _partials directory within the templates directory.

You can import partials inside other templates using the following syntax (omitting the .mustache file extension).

{{> sidebar }}