The wrong variables are being shown

You’re probably running into a “feature” of The Cascade.

The most common issue here is when you are looping over some entries, one of the entries doesn’t have a certain variable, but the “page” you are on does have it. When you output that variable to your template, you expect to see nothing, but actually get the value from the current page.

For example…

Let’s say you’re viewing a post about the movie Lord of the Rings. On your post template you also loop over the latest 2 movie entries:

title: Lord of the Rings
rating: 5 stars

title: Godfather

title: Stepbrothers
rating: 3

<h1>{{ title }}</h1>
Rating: {{ rating }}

<h2>Other movies</h2>
{{ collection:movies limit="2" }}
    {{ title }}, {{ if rating }}Rating: {{ rating }}{{ else }}Unrated{{ /if }}
{{ /collection:movies }}

You might expect this to output something like this:

<h1>Lord of the Rings</h1>
Rating: 5

<h2>Other movies</h2>
Godfather, Unrated
Stepbrothers, Rating: 3

But in fact, you will see this:

<h1>Lord of the Rings</h1>
Rating: 5

<h2>Other movies</h2>
Godfather, Rating: 5
Stepbrothers, Rating: 3

But why?

Why is the Godfather rated 5? This is because the rating variable is cascading down from the page (Lord of the Rings) scope, which has rating: 5.

If the Godfather had a rating, it would override the rating in the cascade.

Most of the time, this is a great feature, and is what allows Statamic to have page variables available you to you without needing a special tag to retrieve them. In this case, we don’t want that.

Then how?

The solution is to bypass the cascade by specifying a scope.

<h1>{{ title }}</h1>
Rating: {{ rating }}

<h2>Other movies</h2>
{{ collection:movies limit="2" scope="post" }}
    {{ post:title }}, {{ if post:rating }}Rating: {{ post:rating }}{{ else }}Unrated{{ /if }}
{{ /collection:movies }}

Here we scoped the variables in the loop under post. Now since we are accessing the variables specifically in the post array, the cascade won’t affect it.