liquid/basics/_handles.md

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Handles

A handle is used to access the attributes of a Liquid object. By default, the handle is the object's title in lowercase with any spaces and special characters replaced by hyphens (-).

For example, a page with the title "About Us" can be accessed in Liquid via its handle about-us as shown below:

{% highlight liquid %} {% raw %}

{{ pages.about-us.content }} {% endraw %} {% endhighlight %}

Creating handles

An object with the title "Shirt" will automatically be given the handle shirt. If there is already an object with the handle shirt, the handle will auto-increment. In other words, "Shirt" objects created after the first one will receive the handle shirt-1, shirt-2, and so on.

Whitespace in titles is replaced by hyphens in handles. For example, the title "My Shiny New Title" will be given the handle my-shiny-new-title.

Handles also determine the URL of their corresponding objects. For example, a page with the handle about-us would have the url /pages/about-us.

Websites often rely on static handles for pages, posts, or objects. To preserve design elements and avoid broken links, if you modify the title of an object, its handle is not automatically updated. For example, if you were to change a page title from "About Us" to "About This Website", its handle would still be about-us.

You can change an object's handle manually (TK how to change a handle manually)

Accessing handle attributes

In many cases you may know the handle of a object whose attributes you want to access. You can access its attributes by pluralizing the name of the object, then using either the square bracket ( [ ] ) or dot ( . ) notation.

{% highlight liquid %} {% raw %} {{ pages.about-us.title }} {{ pages["about-us"].title }} {% endraw %} {% endhighlight %}

{% highlight text %} About Us About Us {% endhighlight %}

In the example above, notice that we are using pages as opposed to page.