Why is my variable not available here or there? 🙄

Moving from old regular template languages where the scope is rarely an issue, you may have a hard time wrapping your head around Go Template scoping constraints.

In this article we’ll try and understand the impact of the scope/context within our templates and partials and how to juggle with the dot 🤹.

Go Template is the templating language used by Hugo and other Go systems. Now it is not Twig or Blade or Liquid, don’t get fooled by the familiar curlies. It is a far stretch from those well known Templating Languages out there…

{{ printf "Hello %s %s. %s" $firstname (slicestr $middlename 0 1) $lastname }}

What is this 😨

{{ if or (eq firstname "George") (eq firstname "Daniel") }}

or that ? 😱

The first time you’re gonna stumble on the syntax above may be a bit deconcerting if you come from more conventional languages.

I spent a lot a time trying to figure out how best to use Go Template.

Using comparison with more familiar syntaxes, I wrote this modest cheat sheat article to try and help unveil the misteries of Go Template

Hugo Page’s context is not only the most important source of information for your pages, it is the main data soure for all of your templates. More often than not, you will need to add a layer of custom variables to the built in set!

With Hugo’s .Scratch, any Page or Shortcode can be complemented with as many variables as needed on top of the default Page or Shortcode Variables.

Excited yet? Let’s dive in!