description: Reusable content with placeholder expressions, used for page creation, slash commands, and more.

tags: glossary

A template in SilverBullet is a string that contains ${expression} placeholders, which get evaluated using Space Lua. Templates are a mechanism for dynamically rendering content in your pages.

Creating templates

Use template.new to create a template function from a string. By convention, template strings use [==[ and ]==] as delimiters:

templates.greet = template.new[==[Hello, ${name}!]==]

Call the template with a table of values:

${templates.greet {name = "World"}}

Rendering collections

The preferred pattern is to apply a template to each row directly in your query’s select clause:

query[
  from p = index.pages()
  order by p.lastModified desc
  limit 5
  select templates.pageItem(p)
](
  from p = index.pages()
  order by p.lastModified desc
  limit 5
  select templates.pageItem(p)
)

The older template.each(collection, template) API still works (see API/template#template.each(collection, template)), but the select-based form is more compact and composes naturally with the rest of Space Lua/Integrated Query.

Pre-built templates

The standard library provides several commonly used templates in the templates table:

Template	Description
`templates.pageItem`	Renders a page as `* [pageName](pageName)`
`templates.fullPageItem`	Similar to `pageItem` but rendering the full page name (including folders)
`templates.taskItem`	Renders a task as a togglable checkbox item with a link to its source so that it can update
`templates.itemItem`	Renders a list item with a link to its source
`templates.paragraphItem`	Renders a paragraph with a link to its source
`templates.tagItem`	Renders a tag as a linked hashtag

Page templates

Page Template|Page templates are pages tagged with #meta/template/page. They serve as blueprints for creating new pages — you can configure them with suggested names, keyboard shortcuts, and commands.

Slash templates

Slash Templates are pages tagged with #meta/template/slash. They define Slash Command|slash commands that insert templated content at the cursor position. The last component of the page name becomes the slash command name.