Custom Page Templates

Imagine that you’ve created a page called «About Us» and WordPress has given it the slug about-us. How would you create a custom template just for this page?

There are a few ways to manage custom pages in WordPress and Timber, in order from simple to complex.

Custom Twig File #

If you're using the Timber Starter Theme you can

• Create a file called page-about-us.twig inside your views and go crazy.
• Copy and paste the contents of page.twig so you have something to work from.

How does this work?

In the page.php file you'll find this code:

Timber::render([
    'page-' . $post->post_name . '.twig',
    'page.twig',
], $context);

This is telling PHP to first look for a Twig file named page-{{ slug }}.twig and then fall back to page.twig if that doesn't exist. With the array notation, you can add as many fallbacks as you need.

Custom PHP File #

If you need to do something special for a page in PHP, you can use the standard WordPress template hierarchy to gather and manipulate data for this page. In the example above, you would create a file

/wp-content/themes/my-theme/page-about-us.php

and populate it with the necessary PHP. You can use the contents of the starter theme’s page.php file as a guide.

Custom Page Template #

Create a file with the following comment header:

/**
 * Template Name: My Custom Page
 * Description: A Page Template with a darker design.
 */

// Code to display Page goes here...

In the WordPress admin, a new entry will be added in your page’s list of available templates like so:

• Name it something like /wp-content/themes/my-theme/template-my-custom-page.php.
• Do NOT prefix the filename with page- or WordPress will get very confused due to WordPress template hierarchy.