At 09:32 PM 1/18/2002 -0500, Duncan wrote:
>We know that one of the steepest learning curves for those of us
>trying to become conversant with conversant is getting a handle on
>templates and all the cool customisation. It's almost too powerful
>B-} Some pre-prepared Radio/BloggerAPI 'reception' weblog
>template(s) that emulated the look of sites hosted by Manila or
>Blogger, etc., and that could be easily selected - perhaps during
>site creation - would overcome the fear factor of such a powerful CMS.
The template system used to give me fits, but the InsertTemplate feature
really took care of that for me, and it is easily one of my favorite features.
On each site I have the same set of templates which only includes
HTML/macros for a very small part of the page
* Advertisement - top of page ad
* BottomAdmin - the admin stuff that you see at the bottom of the site
* BoundMessages - bound message content
* Breadcrumbs - breadcrumbs
* Copyright - copyright notice
* CustomFields - I use this to display custom field values for admins.
* GuestsMembers - macros for the Guests/Members features
* Header - HTML header
* Navigation - left hand navigation
* PageContent - a condition that says, if it's a bound message use the
bound messages template, otherwise insert the page content
* PrintOnly - template to use if someone wants a print only version
* RightColumn - whatever is going to be in the right hand column
So then the default templates looks something like:
--inserttemplate name="header"--
--inserttemplate name="breadcrumbs"--
--inserttemplate name="PageContent"--
--inserttemplate name="Copyright"--
--inserttemplate name="BottomAdmin"--
Obviously the template is a little more complex to accomodate the
navigation tables, etc., but not all that much. I've found it is a godsend
to be able to work on isolated chunks like that, plus the really cool think
is that you can nest these templates so a subtemplate can call a
subtemplate which can call a subtemplate.
This is especially true with a site like mine where when I was just using
one big template, it got impossible to keep track of the logic of all of
the conditionals (i.e., I'd see an endif statement and have no idea which
if statement it was terminating).
