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Enhancing Template Details |
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Written by Raúl Benavides
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Saturday, 09 October 2004 |
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Today we added a new section to our website called "Tips & Tricks" similar to Mambosolutions.com "Tips and Tricks" section, in our new section we will try to focus on templates creation and web design tips and tricks in general that may help you in becoming creative at making your own template. Here’s our first little tip for you.
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ENHANCING
TEMPLATE DETAILS
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With
this basic tip we want show Mambo users and mainly to people who
usually make Mambo templates a simple way to intoduce a touch
of distinction in their work.
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IMPORTANT
NOTE!:
We are not XML experts, this article was just
written with our own experience. |
We'll
show you how to modify the information that appears in the backend
administration of templates in Mambo, like author name, email, creation
date, etc.
Elements we find in the templateDetails.xml file
of any template.
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This
article don't pretends to be a XML reference! We'll only show
the few steps we need to do the necessary modifications.
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This
is the basic structure of the templateDetails.xml file, in wich
you can see the different tags used to describe a template.
<files>, <images>
and <css> tags are used to manage the files
included in the template so we won't play with them ;) |
The
XML parser treats the text inside each tag as plaintext so if we
want the parser not to do that just we need to use a new tag called
CDATA . With
this new tag everything inside it will be ignored by the parser.
How can we use this trick in a template?
For example, we want to change the color and font-size of the template's
author.
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- Locate
the templateDetails.xml file in the template directory and open
it for editing.
- Locate
the tag we want to modify, in this case <author>
- We
must insert between the tags <author></author>
the new tag CDATA, to do so type this: <![CDATA[
for opening tag and ]]> for enclosure tag.
- Now
inside CDATA tag just insert the HTML code we want to use for
modifying the content, for example: <font
size=2" face="Verdana, Arial" color="Crimson"><b>The
name of the author<b></font>
You are right, you can include any HTML tag you want.
- Other
trick you can use is to insert images instead of text or both,
a good method is to include the image you want inside the template's
images folder and then call it from the xml file, just let play
your imagination.
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templateDetails.xml
Elements
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Admin
BackEnd Display (TH) |
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XML
Tag |
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| Name |
<name></name> |
| Published
Author |
<author></author> |
| Version |
<version></version> |
| Date |
<creationDate></creationDate> |
| Author
Email |
<authorEmail></authorEmail> |
| Author
URL |
<authorURL></authorURL> |
| Copyright |
<copyright></copyright> |
| Description |
<description></description> |
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Mambo
4.5 |
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- When
the <name> tag is parsed by Mambo,it
adds a [info]
link near the name template. This can't be modified by this
way.
- The
<authorURL> tag can't be modified! This
element is automatically parsed like plain text and then transformed
in a hyperlink by Mambo. It means any tag you include here will
be ignored and any plain text will be treats as the text for
the link.
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Mambo
4.5.1 |
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The
4.5.1 version of Mambo uses the information of the xml file in
a different way than version 4.5.
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- In
this case the <name> tag can't be modified because is
used like the <authorURL> tag in 4.5. Now is converted
in hyperlink that points to the thumbnail template.
- The
author email table in the backend admin now dissapears and is
mixed with the author table, we mean <author> tag and
<authorEmail> when are treat by Mambo, in the backend
is showed the author name as a hyperlink to the email (<authorEmail>).
- <copyright>
and <description> tags are not used in backend now.
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| This
is all by now, if you have any suggestion for this article or knows
something new to add here just write to us. |
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CREDITS |
- MamboHUT
for publishing this article.
- Damian
Caynes (for his original idea)
- The
Mambo Community!
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| END
OF FILE |
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@by rabencor |
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