Content from a spreadsheet

In this example we are going to read a list of (dummy) animals from a CSV file and create virtual pages for each animal.

Note: For this example we are using a .csvfile where fields are separated by a semi-colon. If you are using other separators in your own file, change the separator parameter when calling the csv() method below accordingly.

The parent content folder

Let's create an animals folder for our site, which is used as the parent for all animal subpages.

content
- animals
  - animals.txt
  - animals.csv

We can put the animals.csv directly inside this folder to make it nice and clean to read data from that file. You could even provide an uploader for this in the panel later, so your content editors can update the csv file whenever they have a fresh export with updated data.

Reading from the CSV

To convert the CSV from the file to a PHP array we are going to use a little csv() helper function. This function is stored in a small plugin. It takes the absolute path to the csv file and returns a nice and clean array.

/site/plugins/helpers/index.php

<?php
function csv(string $file, string $delimiter = ','): array
{
    $lines = file($file);

    $lines[0] = str_replace("\xEF\xBB\xBF", '', $lines[0]);

    $csv = array_map(function($d) use($delimiter) {
        return str_getcsv($d, $delimiter);
    }, $lines);

    array_walk($csv, function(&$a) use ($csv) {
       $a = array_combine($csv[0], $a);
    });

    array_shift($csv);

    return $csv;
}

Creating the virtual subpages

We are using a new page model for the animals page, which will read from the csv and create a virtual child page for each animal on the fly.

/site/models/animals.php

<?php

class AnimalsPage extends Page
{

    public function children()
    {
        $csv      = csv($this->root() . '/animals.csv', ';');
        $children = array_map(function ($animal) {
            return [
                'slug'     => Str::slug($animal['Scientific Name']),
                'template' => 'animal',
                'model'    => 'animal',
                'num'      => 0,
                'content'  => [
                    'title'       => $animal['Scientific Name'],
                    'commonName'  => $animal['Common Name'],
                    'description' => $animal['Description'],
                ]
            ];
        }, $csv);

        return Pages::factory($children, $this);
    }

}

The template

With the new page model, we can now render all animals in our animals.php template as if they were regular Kirby pages.

/site/templates/animals.php

<?php snippet('header') ?>

<main>
  <h1><?= $page->title() ?></h1>

  <ul class="animals">
    <?php foreach ($page->children() as $animal): ?>
    <li>
      <a href="<?= $animal->url() ?>">
        <?= $animal->title() ?>
      </a>
    </li>
    <?php endforeach ?>
  </ul>

</main>

<?php snippet('footer') ?>

Subpages

Each animal will automatically get its own subpage. Routing will work out of the box and you can create an animal.php template to render each individual animal.

/site/templates/animal.php

<?php snippet('header') ?>

<article class="animal">
  <h1 class="animal-scientific-name"><?= $page->title() ?></h1>
  <p class="animal-common-name">Common name: <?= $page->commonName() ?></p>
  <div class="animal-description">
    <?= $page->description()->kt() ?>
  </div>
</article>

<?php snippet('footer') ?>