Pika Variables

You can use various special variables in your posts and pages to do things like add some recent blog posts to a custom home page. Note: They don’t work inside inline code or code blocks. Here’s what Pika supports:

• Blog post variables
• Blog tag variables
• Letterbird contact form variable
• Newsletter subscribe form variable
• Search form variable
• Table of contents variable

Output your blog posts

There are three variables to output your blog posts:

• {{ posts }} and {{ posts_by_year }} output your posts in a list layout.
• {{ posts_in_stream }} outputs your posts in a stream layout.

They can all be customized by a number of parameters, like this example:

{{ posts limit: 10 skip: 5 tag: "Bill Murray" without_tag: "Chevy Chase" has_title: yes sent_as_newsletter: no sort: alpha }}

Note: These variables do not currently offer pagination.

Optional parameters

limit

Maximum number of posts to display. If not specified, defaults to 500 for post list variables and 20 for post stream variables. The maximum number of posts to display is 500 for post list variables and 50 for post stream variables.

skip

Skip the first n posts.

tag

Only include posts with the specified tag.

without_tag

Exclude posts with the specified tag.

has_title

yes (only posts with titles) or no (only posts without titles).

sent_as_newsletter

yes (only posts sent as newsletters) or no (only posts not sent as newsletters).

sort

Use alpha to override the default sorting by date. This parameter only works with the {{ posts }} variable.

with_excerpts

Use no to override the default, which is yes (showing excerpts with “Continue reading” links). This parameter only works with the {{ posts_in_stream }} variable.

Output your blog tags

There are two variables to output your blog post tags:

• {{ tags }} outputs an alphabetical, comma-separated list of your blog tags.
• {{ tag_list }} outputs an alphabetical HTML list of your blog tags.

Optional parameters

separator

Use a custom tag separator in place of a comma in the {{ tags }} variable. Example: {{ tags separator: " | " }}

Output your Letterbird contact form

Letterbird is another service from Good Enough that allows you to create a simple contact form. While it has its own embed code, Pika has a first-class variable for you to embed your form (like on a contact page):

{{ letterbird_form user: yourusername }}

Optional parameters

user

Your Letterbird username. This is a required parameter.

showheader

Include your Letterbird form header.

Output your Newsletter subscribe form

While there’s an option in Newsletter Settings to automatically include your subscription form on your site, you can also embed your form anywhere with this variable:

{{ newsletter_subscription_form }}

There are no parameters for this variable.

Output your Search form

If you have Site Search enabled, you can embed a search form anywhere with this variable:

{{ search_form }}

There are no parameters for this variable.

Output a table of contents

Automatically generate a linked table of contents from all the headings (h1–h6) in the body of your post or page:

{{ table_of_contents }}

It can be customized by a couple of parameters, like this example:

{{ table_of_contents heading: "On This Page" only_headers: "h2 h3" }}

Optional parameters

heading

A title to display above the table of contents as an H2, which is not included in the table of contents list itself.

only_headers

A space-separated list of heading levels (h1-h6) to include.