CMS

Markdown based Content Management System in Elements

Server Requirements

The CMS Components in Elements require PHP 8.x or newer. You must ensure all CMS related pages use a .php extension.

Wrapper Components

These components are used as wrappers, or container, components. You should place other components inside of these. Components placed inside these components will gain access to CMS data.

CMS Component	Description
Static Item	Wrapper for fetching a single item from the CMS.
Collection	Wrapper for fetching a collection (folder) og items.
Collection Item	Used for Collection page templates. Will fetch the requested Collection Item based on the slug in the URL.
Collection Search	Adds instant search for any collection.

Child Components

These components should be placed inside the wrapper components. These components have access to CMS data, such as as the title, date, author, body, and so on.

Component	Description
Body	Used to access the body of an item.
Item Author	Display the author for the current item.
Item Tags	Display tags for the current item.
Related Items	Display items related to the current item. Must be placed inside a Static Item or Collection Item.
Collection Pagination	Adds pagination links to any collection. Must be placed inside a Collection.
Conditional	Conditionally display content.

File and Folder Setup

The built-in CMS system in Element requires a specific file and folder setup to work. You must ensure all blog related pages use a .php extension.

Content

Content should be stored as Markdown down files inside a dedicated folder.

• cms

  • posts

    • 2025-04-18-my-first-post.md

    • 2025-04-19-another-blog-post.md

The structure for the Markdown file:

---
title: "An Example Post"
date_published: "2025-04-20"
author: Steve
tags: [technology]
status: published
feature_image: blog/myimage.jpg
featured: true
---
This is the contents of my first post.

Authors

You can create additional metadata about Authors by organizing a folder structure with supplementary markdown files. In this example, the authors folder is placed at the same level as the "posts" folder.

• cms

  • posts

  • authors

    • steve.md

    • jasmin.md

The structure for the Authors Markdown file:

---
name: "Steve"
avatar: blog/steve-photo.png
---
This is all about Steve.

RSS Feed

Any page with a CMS collection can provide an RSS feed. Simply append ?format=rss to the end of the URL, like this yourwebsite.com/blog/?format=rss .

Advanced

A $post array containing the post's information is available to any component placed inside a Collection or Item component.

Name	Type	Example
author	array	<?=$post['author']?>
author.avatar	string | null	<?=$post['author']['avatar']?>
author.bio	string | null	<?=$post['author']['bio']?>
author.name	string	<?=$post['author']['name']?>
author.slug	string	<?=$post['author']['slug']?>
body	string	<?=$post['body']?>
date_published	string	<?=$post['date_published']?>
featured	boolean	<?=$post['featured']?>
feature_image	string	<?=$post['feature_image']?>
slug	string	<?=$post['slug']?>
status	string	<?=$post['status']?>
tags	array	<?=$post['tags']?>
title	string	<?=$post['title']?>