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Help files or instructions for using templates

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Help files or instructions for using templates
Is there any additional help for modifying and using templates (or stylesheets)? For example, which templates are used for building link pages, instructions for using headers and footers, information on using separate templates for each category, what are stylesheets? I just need some basic info on where to start with the modifications.
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Re: Help files or instructions for using templates In reply to
I checked the FAQ page but it was quite out dated. Is there any other place where updated instructions can be found?

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Re: Help files or instructions for using templates In reply to
FTFM
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Re: Help files or instructions for using templates In reply to
If that was supposed to say RTFM, that was what I was basically requesting. Where do I find TFM? I was unable to find anything on this web site regarding a manual or help files for templates or headers/footers, or creating individual templates for each category. I have already read the readme.txt for ver. 1.1 and looked at the site_html.pl file for version 2.

[This message has been edited by lunaria (edited February 15, 1999).]
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Re: Help files or instructions for using templates In reply to
Based on posts Alex has made over the past week or so, there isn't any documentation that I know of right now. He's been so busy getting Links 2.0 ready for release, so he probably hasn't had time to completely write documentation.

Your best bet is to go back through the Links Beta forum and see what is available. Do a search on template and you should find plenty of information that should help until documentation becomes available.
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Re: Help files or instructions for using templates In reply to
Sorry about the delay's, I had a lot of trouble with setting up the new server and getting Links 2.0 out. I'll be updating the docs and the rest of the site shortly (this week sometime).

As for templates:

which templates are used for building link pages: I'm not sure what you mean by "link" pages? There are four main templates: home.html, new.html, cool.html and category.html. Category.html will be used for every category page.

instructions for using headers and footers: Put either the name of a file in the headers directory or some html into the header/footer field. Then in the template <%header%> will contain either the contents of a file or the html you included.

information on using separate templates for each category: Can't do that without modifications. Bobsie posted a message about this within the last two weeks though.

what are stylesheets: Stylesheets are part of HTML 4.0 and are for controlling layout and formatting of pages. You can remove them (although not that easily). I hope to add different "default" templates sometime this week so you can start with a Yahoo type look, etc.

Hope this helps some,

Alex
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Re: Help files or instructions for using templates In reply to
Thanks everyone and Alex. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything that was already available out there.

You are doing a great job Alex. To have the creator of a software available to listen to suggestions and answer questions is a rare thing now-a-days.
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If you want to learn how to use stylesheets, I suggest "Mulder's Stylesheet Tutorial" at webmonkey (very complete and easy to understand):

www.hotwired.com/webmonkey/stylesheets/?tw=stylesheets

One big tip: make sure you check your results with Netscape AND IE...as usual their support for CSS varies oddly and you have to tweak things to get good results in both browsers. Be especially careful with any layering you try to do with positioning elements, Netscape support for this is especially poor and you might end up with a jumbled mess. If you don't want to bother with CSS, just remove the:

<link rel=stylesheet href="<%build_root_url%>/links.css" type="text/css" title="<%site_title%> style sheet">

line from the headers of every template and build a your pages with whatever HTML code you are comfortable writing. You can leave all of the class="whatever" attributes...they won't do anything without a stylesheet reference and will make life easier if you want to give them a go later on. If you do take out the stylesheet, you should also replace the DOC TYPE line at the beginning (if you don't, you may get false errors from any validator you may use):
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">


As for the links template, if you are referring to which template inserts the link itself, it's just called "link.html". When you open it, you'll notice that it isn't a complete HTML doc (it's just a <UL> entry.) Changing this template just affects the link appearance; you still have to modify all of the other templates for page appearance.