What is the 'Universal ID' for?

Loops & Logic
1

Just wondering what the Universal ID is for? I cannot find any reference to this in the docs.

I also tried calling a template from within a template and it did not work:

    <Loop type="post" orderby="date" order="desc" category="news,mixes,podcast">
        <Template id="6adb2f" />
    </Loop>

Thanks.

2

Hi Phil, the universal ID is generated based on the creation date of the template and some other randomness so that it’s completely unique across all of L&L on every site. We put it in place mostly for the sake of template sharing between projects. If you import a template with the same unique ID as one that already exists on your site, you’ll be warned that it’s a duplicate and get some options:

2022-09-21_11-58-14

This will also have implications when we eventually implement cloud features :slight_smile:

3

Thanks for the info @julia.

So, is the UID supposed to work for calling another template using the Template tag? It did not seem to work for me and I think people will assume they can use it in place of the standard ID.

4

It seems that for now, the UID is only used when importing/exporting templates to avoid creating duplicates of the same template and could probably be used in the future to enable some kind of version control. I can imagine that it’d be useful to allow you to write <Template uid=6adb2f /> so that you could share a collection of templates that refer to each other and you could be sure that the right template would be referenced on any site, but that isn’t implemented for now. I’ll pass the idea along. For now, you could just use the name attribute in the template tag since it should be possible to keep that consistent across sites you manage.

5

For my purposes ID is best as I’m often renaming templates to reflect the site structure, this will settle down at some point. It’s easy enough to fix references if I build a new website.

My main point was that people will try using the UID but it’s not going to work. It should be hidden if it has no practical use or just add some help text to the UI. :slightly_smiling_face: