On Nov 6, 2006, at 3:22 AM, Quim Gil wrote:
it's possible to create a main_template and some basic templatesDo you mean we can have several templates prepared for secondary pagesand editors could choose a template when creating a page? For instance,having 5 templates for case studies so they don't look all the same.This would make wgo nicer. Editors could still be able to pick a "Emptybody template" and compose the body inside inserting images etc, but lazy editors could just pick a template according to the materials available (i.e. short text and 2 pictures) and go for it. Or am I misunderstanding the "template" thing?
main_template in Plone is the name of a file of the template that controls the structure of every page in a web site.
Templating in Plone usually refers to writing Zope Page Templates (ZPT). These creatures pull in data from various content objects and allow for a limited amount of presentation logic to be embedded within them.
For your case study example that sounds more like content templating. There is a product that supports this (I've not used it) called, well, Plone Templates:
http://plone.org/products/plonetemplates/Finally, it should be mentioned that there is a 'display' menu in Plone allows you to select which ZPT template is used to display a particular content object. Stock Plone includes a few displays that can be used for the Folder content type, e.g. standard view, tabular view and thumbnail view. The other content types only have a single view method out-of-the-box (which means that do not have a display menu), but it's quite easy to add new templates, in which case the display menu shows up for those objects.
It is a common pattern to do one-offs of these display menu templates. For example, I wrote a template that had Job application information hard-coded in it, and then said, 'display a table of all jobs within this Folder'. Of course, there is only one folder in the web site in which this display makes any sense:
http://www.bcgsc.ca/career/Using the display menu would also make sense if you developed an add- on product for Plone that provided a Case Study content type. If you built this content type along the lines of RichDocument (http:// plone.org/products/richdocument) it could then have a number of images attached to it. You could then have templates such as, 'first image large on the right, all other images thumbnail on the bottom' , 'all images as thumbnail' etc.
- Kevin