Layouts & Partials

Edit page chrome and reusable partials from the admin — detach, reattach, or build from scratch.

Three theme primitives, all editable in the admin

Squilla exposes three editable theme primitives in the admin UI: layouts, layout blocks (partials), and content blocks. This page covers the first two; Content Blocks covers the lego bricks of node bodies.

What's a layout

A layout is the page-level chrome — the <html> wrapper, the head metadata, the site header / footer placement, and the slot where the node's blocks render. Examples: default, 2-col, landing, docs (the layout this very page is rendered with).

What's a layout block (a.k.a. partial)

A reusable fragment included from one or more layouts — site header, site footer, sidebar, breadcrumb. Conceptually they're partials; the legacy naming says "layout blocks". A rename is on the roadmap.

Manage at `/admin/layouts`

The list shows every registered layout with name, slug, source (theme / extension / user), assigned node types, and a preview thumbnail when available.

Three sources

Theme-owned — read-only by default; comes with the active theme
Extension-owned — read-only; an extension shipped this layout
User-owned — fully editable; created in the admin or detached from a theme/extension

Detach

Click Detach on any theme/extension layout. The kernel copies the layout's template into a new user-owned row that overrides the source. From then on, your edits stick across theme reinstalls. Reattach deletes the user-owned override and falls back to the source.

Create from scratch

Hit New layout for a blank user-owned layout: name, slug, description, template_code (Go html/template), assignable node types.

minimal user-owned layout

<!doctype html>
<html lang="{{ .request.language }}">
  <head>{{ template "head" . }}</head>
  <body>
    {{ renderLayoutBlock "site-header" }}
    <main>{{ .node.blocks_html }}</main>
    {{ renderLayoutBlock "site-footer" }}
  </body>
</html>

HEADS UP

Layouts and partials are loaded into the renderer cache at theme activation. After editing a theme-owned layout on disk you must re-activate the theme. User-owned layouts (admin-edited) bust the cache automatically on save.

Layout assignment

Each node type pins a default layout (configured in /admin/node-types). Per-node overrides live in the node edit screen's sidebar (Layout override picker). Resolution order at render time:

Per-node override, if set
Node-type default layout
The theme's catch-all default layout

Layout blocks (partials)

Manage at /admin/layout-blocks. Same source model as layouts (theme / extension / user-owned, with detach + reattach). Each layout block has:

Slug — the identifier used by renderLayoutBlock "<slug>"
Name + description
Template code (Go html/template)
Field schema — page-level overrides; see below

Page-level field overrides

If a partial has a field_schema, every node using a layout that includes that partial gets a Layout block fields tab on its edit screen. Set the values for that page; the partial's template reads them as .partial.<field_key>.

This is the path for things like a per-page hero image override, a per-page CTA tweak, a per-page sidebar variant. Useful for marketing pages without forcing every change into the node's blocks_data.

NOTE

Today partial fields are page-level only. There's no global "set this partial's field for every page" option — you set it on each page individually, or default it in the partial's schema. Global per-partial values are on the roadmap.