Simple instructions on site re-design (templates)...

[JGerrity]

Hello,

Thought I'd post this question as within a separate topic...

I've been reading all of the documentation and wiki info for lots of late nights...some of it is really good, clear and easy to follow. Others lead to dead links or incomplete information.

I know that Xataface uses SMARTY templates and I've been reading up on those and doing practice apps. However, what I'd really like to do is to customize the app to fit within an existing website style/format. The closest I was able to find was from a response Steve wrote back on May 21, 2007.

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1. Templates:

The auction is extremely flexible for templates, and can have its entire look and feel changed by creating a single HTML page.Ê (See the SFU auction for an example of a different look: ).Ê Currently there aren't any themes available, however, I'll be writing a tutorial this week on how to create themes in Dataface (which is the same as for web auction) so you'll be able to create themes pretty easily.

The process for creating a theme will roughly involve:

Find a template you like.Ê Either make your own or download one from a site like ....
Copy some Smarty tags into the template and place it in a certain directory
Add 1 line to the conf.ini file.

The documentation I will create will be more in depth.
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I'd like to read the documentation if possible and see an example of how you can change the entire look and feel by creating a single HTML page. When reading the docs on templates and custom style sheets it looks like the page was edited or not asin the documentation on "how to include customer javascripts and stylesheets in your application"

Perhaps it's old documentation and now converted to Wiki, but I keep running into dead ends and page not found links.

I was trying to set up an application to emulate the Plant Sale WebAuction site at SFU...any pointers in the direction to learn step by step how to customize templates or layouts would be greatly appreciated. What I'm trying to do is use WebAuction with the latest release of Xataface but change the layout to reflect that of existing website. Easier to show then say...www.bosl.ca/office.htm I want to have the categories or auction items on the left where the picture of the two players is (grey background area), then on the right (where the white background is) have the actual items and contents of the auction).

Sorry for the long post and it not being in the webauction section but it's really a Xataface question about templates.

Cheers,
J.

[shannah]

Hi J.,

You seem to be right that there isn't any detailed instructions on creating a theme, other than to say that you can override the Dataface_Main_Template.html template and go to town with your own code.

The ease at which you can take the existing documentation and make your own theme is directly proportional to your level of HTML/CSS expertise. Someone who is a CSS expert could probably get you most of the way to matching your site's look and feel without even overriding any templates - but just using some custom CSS rules.

You might want to start by overriding the Dataface_Main_Template.html template with the static HTML for your website's look. This will make it so all of the pages just show the same thing. When you get it looking right (every page showing the same thing, then you can start adding some of the smarty tags from Xataface into appropriate places of your template (e.g. the blocks, slots, script and css tags) so that your template becomes dynamic.

Unfortunately I don't have any step-by-step examples of this process handy.

-Steve