Kirby's PHP API

Key objects

All the classes

There are a lot more classes and objects at play within Kirby. You can find the most common ones in the Reference:

• Most important objects
• Advanced: all classes
• Class aliases

Permissions

Some parts of Kirby's PHP API only work if you are logged in (or authenticated in other ways), because they respect the permissions of the currently logged in user. E.g. users cannot update a page via $page->update(), unless they are logged in and have adequate permissions. This helps increase the security of your code by blocking operations for unauthorized users.

You can read more about available user permissions as well as how to authenticate or impersonate in the Users permissions docs ›

Immutable objects

Many methods of Kirby objects do not return a string, integer or similar but a Kirby object of the same type. For example, $page->update() is a method applied to an object of Kirby\Cms\Page and also returns an object of Kirby\Cms\Page.

However, it is important to know that most often Kirby's objects are immutable. That means, when you modify an object like $page, $file etc. using a method like update(), changeTitle() and so on, a new (cloned) object with changes applied is returned.

Therefore, you have to store the returned object in a new variable to be able to further work with it. Or if you want to continue using the existing object with these new changes, you need to reassign the returned object to the existing variable:

// $project would still have the old value
$project = page('project/project-a');
$project->update(['year' => 2014]);

// $project has the new value after reassigning
$project = page('project/project-a');
$project = $project->update(['year' => 2014]);

Some methods can return both, $this (the same instance you were calling) and a cloned object (static or self). In the reference, this case is marked with "$this|static" as the return value in the doc block for the method. $this is returned whenever the object wasn't changed (e.g. values remained the same), while a cloned object is returned when the data changed - to keep the original object immutable. Most times, this difference will not affect your code if you always store the return value in a variable and continue working with that variable as explained above.