This section covers Twig templates in Contao 4.13 and up. The documentation for legacy PHP templates (.html5
extension) can be found in this article.
Contao’s template system builds on the Twig template engine. Historically, PHP templates were used and are now transitioned away from — this is why you can still find a lot of their remains in the current codebase. Native Twig support made its way into the core in Contao 4.12 and allowed users to substitute existing templates with Twig templates. Beginning with Contao 5, the majority of content elements were rewritten and are now Twig-only. Extrapolating from here, we ultimately plan to drop support for the PHP templating system in Contao 6.
It’s hard to get things right in the first try and replacing the old template system with Twig is a big undertaking.
That’s why some classes in the Contao\Twig namespace are still marked with @experimental. First up, this neither
means, that we will remove the functionality or randomly change things up, nor that you should not use them (in
contrary!). It allows us to tweak things and make changes to the classes’ API in a minor/bugfix release — for example if
a real world use case shows an issue that we did not think about. Should you need to use these classes directly, keep in
mind that, even though chances for changes are getting lower and lower, these classes are not covered by our BC
promise.
All right! Get yourself a big coffee and start your deep-dive into the Contao-Twig ecosystem here:
If you already got some understanding of the system and want to get started quickly, please have a look at our quick reference handbook, where we are collecting examples to cater for the most typical scenarios.