{"path":"/guide/templates","content":{"title":"Templates and rendering","summary":"Separate what a page says from how its stored definition presents it.","breadcrumbs":"[All topics](/guide) / [About Everything](/topics/about-everything)","body":"A page's JSON source holds content such as title, summary and Markdown body. A template defines how selected fields become HTML. The page's template association is a tag, so presentation can change without rewriting historical content bytes.\n\nAll pages in this initial guide use one shared **guide-v1** template. It supplies a responsive reading column, breadcrumbs, section navigation, a related-search sidebar and curated Guide links. The title bar is supplied by the trusted application. Curated links are content fields; search-generated cards come from the template's bounded lexical search.\n\nRead [How pages become websites](/guide/templates/runtime-rendering) to understand how a page is selected and rendered. Templates are a declarative description of a layout, and a missing or invalid template falls back to a safe generic view.\n\nTemplates are stored in the same corpus as pages and media. They are not uploaded executable programs, and a template's active tag is not permission for an anonymous reader to download its raw source.\n\n## In this section\n\n- [How pages become websites](/guide/templates/runtime-rendering) — Page selection is live; warm templates and immutable bytes can be reused.\n- [Search inside templates](/guide/templates/inline-search) — Add columns and a bounded search from a public page field.\n\nSuccessful template selection and its validated definition are [cached without a timeout](/guide/how-it-works/caching) for a warm instance. Template edits can remain stale until eviction/restart. Rendering stays dynamic, and there is no static HTML publishing step.\n\nThe shared guide template also renders the selected page’s tags using `$page.tags`. The trusted context is separate from source JSON, and includes canonical path, logical ID, page type, template ID and revision key. Templates decide where to show it; no extra metadata read is needed.","navigation":"[Everything guide](/guide) · Previous: [Web, JSON and MCP](/guide/reading/interfaces) · Next: [How pages become websites](/guide/templates/runtime-rendering)","related":[{"title":"How pages become websites","url":"/guide/templates/runtime-rendering"},{"title":"The tag model","url":"/guide/how-it-works/tag-model"}]}}