Shearer Software

 

 

This is the ShearerSite template system tutorial.

Note: this tutorial is written to be used with the desktop web server that comes with the program, so with this Internet version you won't be able to try out the directions. With that in mind, keep reading.

Naturally this page has a template applied to it, and you can have hours (or minutes, at least) of fun changing its look by applying different templates. We'll cover how to do that in the next section. First, here's a quick decription of how it works.

When you apply a template to a page, the unique page content is kept, but everything from the old template (if any) is completely replaced. The text you're reading is what's called the template_content region. Everything outside of it is determined by the template itself. (That is, with the exception of some items that should vary from page to page but belong up in the <head> element: embedded scripts and styles, the page title, and keywords, to name a few. The system also works hard to preserve ASP and other server-side code that must be kept at the beginning or end of the file.)

Since the header and footer of this page come from the template, you can try messing them up in an HTML editor. (Just keep the HTML code legal.) Reapplying templates will restore them. This also demonstrates that it's important not to "paint outside the lines" while writing content.

In the HTML source of the page, you can find the template_content region because it's contained in an HTML element (div, span, td, or body) with an id of "template_content", like this:

<div id="template_content">This is my content.</div>

(But what if the template you later apply is a table-based layout that puts its content in a table cell--a <td> element instead of a <div>? It doesn't matter. The content is what's between the tags. The enclosing tags come from the template. So the <div> tags are replaced by the template's <td> tags, and all is well. Using HTML elements as markers this way promotes well-formed HTML files, since balanced template and source files will produce a balanced output file, and major errors in balancing the tag you have chosen will be detected during template application.)

Even though this page already has a marked template_content region, most of the web pages in the world don't. So for these pages (called "simple pages", with no disrespect intended) the whole body of the page is assumed to be the template_content region. If these pages belong to you and you're applying templates for the first time, you'll probably need to remove whatever headers and footers are already there to avoid duplication, unless they are of a type that the template system knows how to remove on its own, such as FrontPage borders.

After you have applied templates, the page always ends up with a template_content block, so the system knows which part is important to keep next time.