Templates extension documentation?

Ruby Apps Radiant CMS
1

Is there a tutorial or some sort of example of how the templates
extension
works in practice? There is some info in the readme but there aren’t any
examples of how it works. It looks like a way to create a page that is
simply a collection of snippets.

What I thought it was is a way to have nested partials, but that doesn’t
seem to be the case.

~Nate

2

Templates does four things:

  1. Provides a customized interface to the page editor
  2. Restricts what page-parts may appear on a page of that type
  3. Hides and consolidates design aspects about how parts of the page
    will be rendered
  4. Auto-selects/restricts the page-class (Archive, File Not Found, etc).

For example, let’s say I have a template for press releases. Press
releases consist of a short description (that also serves as the first
paragraph), a longer description, a location, contact information, and
standard info about the company. So I might set up a template like so:

Location: One-line
Short description: One-line
Long description: Plain textarea [Textile]
Contact information: Plain textarea

Then I would set the structure (which becomes the ‘body’ page-part) to
be something like:

, -

This allows my Layout to serve as a wireframe for the whole site, with
many different page designs filling the “content well”. I would only
need a single <r:content /> tag within the layout to accomplish this.

Does this answer your question?

Sean

p.s. Digital Pulp (Josh, Justin & friends) prefer to call them
content-types and thus renamed them as such in their internal version of
this extension.

3

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 4:20 PM, Sean C. [email protected]
wrote:

This allows my Layout to serve as a wireframe for the whole site, with many
different page designs filling the “content well”. I would only need a
single <r:content /> tag within the layout to accomplish this.

Does this answer your question?

Thanks for the description, Sean. This does clear it up for me.
Something I
was also having trouble with is that the parts I was creating in my
template
were defaulting to the “Boolean” type. That prevented me from getting
any
kind of text field in the pages based on that template. Once I changed
them
to plaintext, and read your description, then I grokked how it worked.

Another question, is there any way, outside of modifying the extension
itself, to get the plaintext boxes to be wider than about 100px? It’s
not a
huge problem because I edit form text with It’s All Text and TextMate,
but I
thought I would ask.

Great extension, now I know how it works. You might want to put that
content
in the readme.

Thanks,

~Nate

4

Also, Sean, there is one small problem with the Templates extension:
there
doesn’t seem to be a way to change the page status from draft to
published.
I set my pages to published in the db, but that will get awfully tedious
in
short order. Is there any other way to set a page’s status to published
without setting it in the admin page view? It would be tremendous if
that
was possible in the page list in the admin side (wink, wink).

Thanks,

~Nate

5

Nate,

It seems to me that what is missing is a blow by blood dripping, gut
wrenching, soul ripping blow account (was that over the top?) of how
to get something going with Templates. You should be writing down your
experiences to share with the rest of us. I’m sure the Radiant Wiki
has room for such a thing.

Adam

6

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 11:00 AM, Adam van den Hoven <
[email protected]> wrote:

Nate,

It seems to me that what is missing is a blow by blood dripping, gut
wrenching, soul ripping blow account (was that over the top?) of how to get
something going with Templates. You should be writing down your experiences
to share with the rest of us. I’m sure the Radiant Wiki has room for such a
thing.

Once I get a full handle on it, I’ll do that. It’s a very handy
extension. I
have never like the idea of switching page layouts to have a different
footer or add sidebar. Maintaining parity on nav bars and header, etc.
is
such a pain. I’ll keep everyone abreast of my experiences with it.

~Nate

7

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 12:08 PM, Sean C. [email protected]
wrote:

Of course, that should be possible. In both the projects I’ve used
templates on, they had some other extension that handled this. Patches are
welcome :).

Of course. After the new year my projects will be ramping down. I’ll try
and
contribute more then. Right now I can use the Copy/Move extension to
change
page status until then.

~Nate

8

Of course, that should be possible. In both the projects I’ve used
templates on, they had some other extension that handled this. Patches
are welcome :).

Sean

9

Sean C. wrote:

Of course, that should be possible. In both the projects I’ve used
templates on, they had some other extension that handled this. Patches
are welcome :).

Sean

What “other” extension would that be?

10

I think the page form controls could be a little prettier and little
more thought out design-wise. I will definitely be contributing to this
extension.