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2: Creating Your Own Templates

Introduction

Using the built-in templates for Iosphere is good for simple test sites or quick help systems, however when it comes to building large sites you will want to to something slightly different. This means creating your own template files.

Creating Templates

Creating template files is no different to creating normal HTML files - the only difference is that you must enter special template identifiers, or properties, into the HTML. You can create them in a standard HTML editor and import them into Iosphere, or use the internal template editor.

Including Properties

You insert a property in an HTML file by typing two percentage signs, followed by the name of the property, followed by another two percentage signs. So, to include the document title you would enter 2: Creating Your Own Templates. You can enter them anywhere in the HTML, even as part of URLs. You can even enter properties in the documents that you write. For example, the following title was inserted automatically: 2: Creating Your Own Templates - the code to do this is: %%Document.Title%%

Iosphere comes with some basic templates - but you won't always want to use them. When you are creating complex sites you'll want to create them yourself. This is surprisingly easy to do, and this section shows you how.

Property Model

As mentioned in What is Iosphere 2?, all Iosphere objects expose a set of properties that you can use in special template files. Revisit the page if you need to refresh your memory. There are a number of standard properties that each object exposes, and these are the ones that are used in the standard templates. You'll need to use them in your own templates as well.

All of the standard Iosphere objects have a 'Properties' configuration page, which lets you set the author, keywords and template for the page. It also lets you set custom properties.

Why have custom properties?

Using the supplied template sets is all very well, but the chances are that you'll want to add you own look to any site that you create. Iosphere can create text-based sites with relative ease, but using pictures for index lists requires some user configuration - Iosphere needs to know where to get the index pictures from.

Each section has its own picture at the top and on the main contents page, but they are all created using the same template set. It is very easy to do this - just specify the location of the picture that you wish to use in a property, and use that property in a template.

Property List

The list of properties is shown in the Iosphere Property Reference.

By Ashley Brown, Email the author