TinyTank

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The blog ​

TinyTank includes a Markdown blog, meant for articles around your site's subject (the "content" part of an SEO strategy). Posts are files in content/blog/; there's no database and no admin.

What you get ​

  • /blog: the newest posts, with live search and tag filters (Datastar)
  • /blog/page/2, /blog/page/3…: older posts, with numbered page links and a Load more button
  • /blog/<slug>: a post, with its own title, description, Open Graph tags and JSON-LD
  • /blog/feed.xml: an Atom feed of the latest posts
  • every published post in /sitemap.xml
  • all of the above per language when posts are translated

The pages are built by App\Controller\BlogController and the templates in templates/blog/ and templates/_partials/blog-*.twig. They're part of your site, so restyle or restructure them freely; the framework provides the data (TinyTank\Blog\Blog) and the feed/sitemap controllers.

Where posts live ​

Each post is a folder named after its slug, filed by publication month, with its images next to it:

content/blog/
  2026/
    09/
      hello-tinytank/           → /blog/hello-tinytank
        index.md                  the post (default language)
        index.it.md               its Italian translation → /it/blog/hello-tinytank
        cover.png                 → /media/blog/hello-tinytank/cover.png
  drafts/
    next-post/                  only visible with APP_DEBUG=1, never deployed
      index.md

Writing posts explains the front matter, images and drafts.

Pagination ​

/blog shows the newest posts; older ones are at /blog/page/2, /blog/page/3… /blog/page/1 redirects to /blog, and pages past the end are a 404. Each page has its own title ("Blog · Page 2") and canonical URL.

The pager in templates/_partials/blog-pager.twig is two pagers in one:

  • without JavaScript (search engines, no-JS visitors): numbered page links with Newer / Older
  • with JavaScript: Datastar hides those links and shows Load more, which appends the next page in place. It also works inside search and tag results.

The number of posts per page is blog.per_page in config/app.php, which reads BLOG_PER_PAGE (default 20). Set BLOG_PER_PAGE=1 in .env to try pagination with only a few posts.

Search and tags ​

The search box and tag buttons on /blog re-render _partials/blog-results.twig through Datastar as you type. Search matches titles, summaries and tags; it covers the posts of the current language.

Caching ​

In production, posts are parsed once into var/cache/blog.php and their files are copied to public/media/blog/, both by bin/console deploy. Run deploy after publishing. In debug mode, posts are parsed on every request, so edits show up immediately.

Using posts elsewhere ​

Query posts anywhere with posts() in Twig or $this->app->posts() in PHP, for example the three latest on the home page:

twig
{% for post in posts().limit(3) %}
    <a href="{{ path('blog_post', {slug: post.slug}) }}">{{ post.title }}</a>
{% endfor %}

See Querying content for every parameter, and the PHP reference for the fields of a post.

TinyTank documentation