GrabAssets is a PicoCMS plugin designed to do one thing and one thing only: get you a list of all your assets in a nice big array.
Installation is easy. Clone GrabAssets into your PicoCMS folder. It consists of a single PHP file named, appropriately enough, GrabAssets.php.
Next, add the two lines to your config.yml file:
assets_dir: assets # path to assets
supported_assets: [gif, jpg, jpeg, png, svg] # supported assets
That's it!
When you load a page, GrabAssets iterates through your assets folder and creates an array named array_of_assets that is accessible via Twig. For example, if you want a page full of images, you could do something like the followiing in Twig:
{% for asset in array_of_assets %}
<pre> {{ asset }} </pre>
{% endfor %}
This would display the asset's location. Not terribly useful! However, suppose you did the following?
{% for asset in array_of_assets %}
<img src="{{ base_url }}/{{ asset }}">
{% endfor %}
It would then display all the images in your asset directory and sub-directories.
Okay, we saw one aspect of this plugin: getting all our images from our assets directory. However, sometimes we want to be a little more precise.
Each .md file starts what looks like some funny looking text. That is actually YAML for that file. It looks like the following:
---
Title: Animal Pictures
Description: Animal Pictures
Author: Lloyd Sargent
Date: 2019-03-17
Robots:
Template: animal-pics-index
selected_assets: assets/2016
---
The YAML option selected_assets goes to the folder where (in our instance) we have a lot of animal pictures from 2016.
A slight modification to our Twig gives us the following:
{% for asset in selected_assets %}
<img src="{{ base_url }}/{{ asset }}">
{% endfor %}
Instead of being an array of ALL our images, it goes to the directory assets/2016 and creates an array of all those images and stores that array in selected_assets. So now, rather than listing all the images in a directory in my .md file, I only need specify the directory. As I add images, it cleverly figures out to add them. It even sorts them so if I don't want them higgledy-piggly, they will come out all ordered!
Yes, that is exactly what it was designed for and it comes at a low-low price of free.
- PicoCMS 3 Alpha-2
- PHP 8.2