Tying articles to a specific site design: my workaround and a couple of questions

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RW Wood	Thursday 25 September 2003 1:48:18 pm None of the developers could offer a better solution for the problem of tying specific content to specific site design, so this is how I accomplished it. Since most of the designs only differ in a couple of graphics and style sheet, I cut that part from the main design and put it in an include in which the info for the graphics and stylesheet is hard coded. That leaves me with only one pagelayout.tpl that needs to be dealt with for site wide design changes that don't affect the included parts in the page. Then, I put the following in the /settings/argentina/override.ini.append file: [argentina_page_color] Source=page_color.tpl MatchFile=argentina_page_color.tpl Subdir=templates Match[section]=4 using one such override for each template include and for each country. Then I made a section and a folder to correspond to each country, assigning the sections to the folders so that the overrides would in effect be matching on the folders that contain each country's content. It works, but it's cludgy and the biggest problem is that the override templates themselves all have to be in the /standard/templates directory and the override/ini.append files have to contain the overrides for ever country in order to work, which is a bit messy as the list of countries and/or template includes grows. Since each country also has a site.ini.append, accessing the site via, /index.php/argentina also works. Were I able to always come in by way of the settings in the site.ini.append for each country, the includes could then be in their own design/override/template directory. Is there anything to streamline what I want to do here or any better way to do it? Is this functionality that will be better implemented in a future release of ezPublish? I see this as the one weak link in the ezPublish package. Otherwise, thanks to the developers for a great piece of software. RWW

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Thursday 25 September 2003 1:48:18 pm

None of the developers could offer a better solution for the problem of tying specific content to specific site design, so this is how I accomplished it.

Since most of the designs only differ in a couple of graphics and style sheet, I cut that part from the main design and put it in an include in which the info for the graphics and stylesheet is hard coded. That leaves me with only one pagelayout.tpl that needs to be dealt with for site wide design changes that don't affect the included parts in the page.

Then, I put the following in the /settings/argentina/override.ini.append file:
[argentina_page_color]
Source=page_color.tpl
MatchFile=argentina_page_color.tpl
Subdir=templates
Match[section]=4

using one such override for each template include and for each country.

Then I made a section and a folder to correspond to each country, assigning the sections to the folders so that the overrides would in effect be matching on the folders that contain each country's content.

It works, but it's cludgy and the biggest problem is that the override templates themselves all have to be in the /standard/templates directory and the override/ini.append files have to contain the overrides for ever country in order to work, which is a bit messy as the list of countries and/or template includes grows.

Since each country also has a site.ini.append, accessing the site via, /index.php/argentina also works. Were I able to always come in by way of the settings in the site.ini.append for each country, the includes could then be in their own design/override/template directory.

Is there anything to streamline what I want to do here or any better way to do it? Is this functionality that will be better implemented in a future release of ezPublish? I see this as the one weak link in the ezPublish package.

Otherwise, thanks to the developers for a great piece of software.
RWW