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.