Collection Tag

Overview

The collection tag is one of main workhorses of your Statamic frontend. It's like an Eloquent model in Laravel or "The Loop" in WordPress – it's how you get data from everywhere (other than the current entry and global variables) into your view.

Example

A basic example would be to loop through the entries in a blog collection and link to each individual blog post:

<ul>
{{ collection from="blog" }}
    <li><a href="{{ url }}">{{ title }}</a></li>
{{ /collection }}
</ul>

You can also use the shorthand syntax for this. We prefer this style ourselves.

<ul>
{{ collection:blog }}
    <li><a href="{{ url }}">{{ title }}</a></li>
{{ /collection:blog }}
</ul>

If you'd like to fetch entries from multiple collections, you'll need to use the standard syntax.

{{ collection from="blog|events" }}

To get entries from all collections, use the wildcard *. You may also exclude collections when doing this.

{{ collection from="*" not_from="blog|events" }}

Filtering

There are a number of ways to filter your collection. There's the conditions syntax for filtering by fields, taxonomy filter for using terms, and the custom filter class if you need extra control.

Conditions

Want to get entries where the title has the words "awesome" and "thing", and "joe" is the author? You can write it how you'd say it:

{{ collection:blog title:contains="awesome" title:contains="thing" author:is="joe" }}

There are a bunch of conditions available to you, like :is, :isnt, :contains, :starts_with, and :is_before. There are many more than that. In fact, there's a whole page dedicated to conditions - check them out.

Taxonomies

Filtering by a taxonomy term (or terms) is done using the taxonomy parameter, similar to the conditions syntax mentioned above.

To show entries with the harry-potter term within the tags taxonomy, you could do this:

{{ collection:blog taxonomy:tags="harry-potter" }}

It is important that the collection has been configured to use this taxonomy in order to filter the results based on the passed in term.

There are a number of different ways to use this parameter. They are explained in depth in the
Taxonomies Guide

Published Status

By default, only published entries are included. Entries can be queried against draft, scheduled, or expired status with conditions on status like this:

// Include draft entries
{{ collection:blog status:in="published|draft" }}
 
// Only include expired entries
{{ collection:blog status:is="expired" }}
 
// Exclude published entries
{{ collection:blog status:not_in="published" }}

Custom Query Scopes

Doing something custom or complicated? You can create query scopes to narrow down those results with the query_scope or filter parameter:

{{ collection:blog query_scope="your_query_scope" }}

Pagination

To enable pagination mode, add the paginate="true" parameter, along with the limit parameter to specify the number of entries in each page.

{{ collection:blog limit="10" paginate="true" as="posts" }}
 
    {{ if no_results }}
        <p>Aww, there are no results.</p>
    {{ /if }}
 
    {{ posts }}
        <article>
            {{ title }}
        </article>
    {{ /posts }}
 
    {{ paginate }}
        <a href="{{ prev_page }}">⬅ Previous</a>
 
        {{ current_page }} of {{ total_pages }} pages
        (There are {{ total_items }} posts)
 
        <a href="{{ next_page }}">Next ➡</a>
    {{ /paginate }}
 
{{ /collection:blog }}

In pagination mode, your entries will be scoped (in the example, we're scoping them into the posts tag pair). Use that tag pair to loop over the entries in that page.

The paginate variable will become available to you. This is an array containing data about the paginated set.

Pagination Examples

The auto_links tag is designed to be your friend. It'll save you more than a few keystrokes, and even more headaches. It will output an HTML list of links for you. With a large number of pages, it will create segments so that you don't end up with hundreds of numbers.

It's clever enough to work out a comfortable range of numbers to display, and it'll also throw in the prev/next arrow for good measure.

Maybe the default markup isn't for you and you want total control. You're a maverick. That's cool, we roll that way sometimes too. That's where the links:all or links:segments array variables come in. These give you all the data you need to recreate your own set of links.

• The links:all array is all the pages with url and page variables.

• The links:segments array will contain the segments mentioned above. You'll be able to access first, slider, and last, which are the 3 segments.

Here's the auto_links output, recreated using the other tags, for you mavericks out there:

{{ paginate }}
    <ul class="pagination">
        {{ if prev_page }}
            <li><a href="{{ prev_page }}">&laquo;</a></li>
        {{ else }}
            <li class="disabled"><span>&laquo;</span></li>
        {{ /if }}
 
        {{ links:segments }}
 
            {{ first }}
                {{ if page == current_page }}
                    <li class="active"><span>{{ page }}</span></li>
                {{ else }}
                    <li><a href="{{ url }}">{{ page }}</a></li>
                {{ /if }}
            {{ /first }}
 
            {{ if slider }}
                <li class="disabled"><span>...</span></li>
            {{ /if }}
 
            {{ slider }}
                {{ if page == current_page }}
                    <li class="active"><span>{{ page }}</span></li>
                {{ else }}
                    <li><a href="{{ url }}">{{ page }}</a></li>
                {{ /if }}
            {{ /slider }}
 
            {{ if slider || (!slider && last) }}
                <li class="disabled"><span>...</span></li>
            {{ /if }}
 
            {{ last }}
                {{ if page == current_page }}
                    <li class="active"><span>{{ page }}</span></li>
                {{ else }}
                    <li><a href="{{ url }}">{{ page }}</a></li>
                {{ /if }}
            {{ /last }}
 
        {{ /links:segments }}
 
        {{ if next_page }}
            <li><a href="{{ next_page }}">&raquo;</a></li>
        {{ else }}
            <li class="disabled"><span>&raquo;</span></li>
        {{ /if }}
    </ul>
{{ /paginate }}

Aliasing

Often times you'd like to have some extra markup around your list of entries, but only if there are results. Like a <ul> element, for example. You can do this by aliasing the results into a new variable tag pair. This actually creates a copy of your data as a new variable. It goes like this:

{{ collection:blog as="posts" }}
  <ul>
  {{ posts }}
    <li><a href="{{ url }}">{{ title }}</a></li>
  {{ /posts }}
  </ul>
{{ /collection:blog }}

Scoping

Sometimes not all of your entries have the same set of variables. And sometimes the page that you're on (while listing entries in a Collection, for example) may have those very same variables on the page-level scope. Statamic assumes you'd like to fallback to the parent scope's data to plug any holes. This logic has pros and cons, and you can read more about scoping and the Cascade here.

You can assign a scope prefix to your entries so you can be sure to get the data you want. Define your scope and then prefix all of your variables with it.

# Page data
featured_image: /img/totes-adorbs-kitteh.jpg

{{ collection:blog scope="post" }}
  <div class="block">
    <img src="{{ post:featured_image }}">
  </div>
{{ /collection:blog }}

You can also add your scope down into your alias loop. Yep, we thought of that too.

{{ collection:blog as="posts" }}
  {{ posts scope="post" }}
    <div class="block">
      <img src="{{ post:featured_image }}">
    </div>
  {{ /posts }}
{{ /collection:blog }}

Combining both an Alias and a Scope on a Collection Tag doesn't make a whole lot of sense. You shouldn't do that.

Grouping

To group entries – by date or any other field – you should use aliasing (explained above) as well as the group_by modifier.
There's no "grouping" feature on the collection tag itself.

For example, if you want to group some dated entries by month/year, you could do this:

{{ collection:articles as="entries" }}
    {{ entries group_by="date|F Y" }}
        {{ groups }}
            <h3>{{ group }}</h3>
            {{ items }}
                {{ title }} <br>
            {{ /items }}
        {{ /groups }}
    {{ /entries }}
{{ /collection:articles }}

Parameters

Variables