If I have a frontmatter on a layout that sets a variable, does that variable apply on the page ?
I have a page with frontmatter and content
---
layout: test
---
{{ myvalue }}
and I have a layout called test with frontmatter
---
myvalue: foo
---
The page does not display foo.
Having read this tutorial I think this doesn’t work because the layout is processed after the page, although that is talking about variables assigned in a layout’s liquid rather than its front matter.
My use case is to override defaults when a specific layout is used. So I have defaults defined in _config.yml but want to change some of those when a specific layout is used. Perhaps there is another way…?
Page variables in front matter are accessed via the page object while layout front matter is layout.
What you probably want to do is use assign to set a new variable that defaults to layout.myvalue but can be overided at the page level.
Something like this:
{% assign myvalue = page.myvalue | default: layout.myvalue %}
And you’d access it with {{ myvalue }} which should output foo. If you set myvalue: bar in a page’s front matter instead of the layout it should output bar.
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Hi @mmistakes, what I am trying to do is set the theme’s toc setting in a layout instead of setting it in the page.
I have toc: true set as a default in _config.yml but I want to disable it for my index pages. I have a _layouts/index.md file where I set toc: false in the frontmatter hoping that pages using that layout would not get a toc. But it doesn’t work like that.
If I have to set something in the page file then I might as well do toc: false in its frontmatter. It’s what I am doing now but I hoped that I could factor that out to the layout.
Sorry - I posed the question in a generic way rather than calling out the theme… 
Ah yeah that’s the problem. The theme looks for page.toc not layout.toc.
Your best bet would be to set a front matter default and scope it to the pages you want that value for.