2.4 Template Includes

Your Templates will contain PHP includes that provide CMS functionality to your templates. However, you may also want to create your own includes, such for a common header or footer in your design.

2.4.1 A quick PHP lesson

This takes a little PHP skill, but is well worth it to improve uniformity of design across your Template Family. Typically you can include a file, which may just be a block of HTML, using the following syntax:

<?php include 'myfile.inc.php'; ?>

Let's quickly deconstruct this:

<?php

This tells your document to interpret the following code as PHP

include

This is a PHP function. A function will process a variable or file in a certain way. The "include" function will grab the contents of the file and write them to the page as if the include's content was originally written on the host page.

'myfile.inc.php'

This is the file we want to include. We use a suffix naming convention of .inc.php to remind us that this file is usually included on a page, and may not function if it was accessed directly.

;

The semi-colon tells PHP that this is the end of the instruction.

?>

The end tag in PHP is represented by a question mark and a greater than symbol. This tells the document that the PHP code has now finished. PHP is executed like a program, rather than displayed like HTML. In Tribiq CMS templates you will often see them written in the single-line form (as in the example), but PHP code may well stretch over many lines.

Inside the templateincludes/ directory are all the commonly-used artefacts, such as search boxes, CMS-driven menus, and so on.

2.4.2 Current Includes

Here is a list of the current Template Includes:

breadcrumb.php - Shows the navigation path to the current content item
calendar.inc.php - Provides the month view calendar
/captcha - The anti-spam/anti-bot image tool
cmserror.php - Provides system-wide error handling
contact_form_functionality.inc.php - Contact Form Functionality
content_bodyfoot.inc.php - used to include content
content_bodymain.inc.php - used to include content
content_bodytop.inc.php - used to include content
doclist.inc.php - Lists all available documents
document.inc.php - Provides document download functionality
event.inc.php - Displays event details
event_day_view.inc.php - Displays day details
extranet_form_functionality.inc.php - Extranet functionality
forum.inc.php - Forum functionality
forum_functionality.inc.php - Forum functionality
gallery.inc.php - Used to create gallery from picture content items
gallery_content.inc.php - Used to create gallery from picture content items
news_listing.inc.php - News listings
params.inc.php - Handles template parameters
picture.inc.php - Handles picture content type
search.inc.php - Handles simple search template
searchbox.inc.php - Provides searchbox
search_functionality.inc.php - Search functionality
search_new.inc.php - Handles advanced/tabbed search template
shortcuts.inc.php - Handles Shortcuts
side_menu.inc.php - Provides a Side menu
topmenu.php - Provides a Top menu

If you are new to the idea of CMS templates, we suggest you have a quick look at some files in this folder but don’t modify them. It will give you an idea of the structure of the HTML that will be produced by the PHP snippets.

You may find that you will want to modify some of these files in the future. If you create your own includes, such as headers and footers, you should place these in:

templates/mysitename/templatefamily/templateincludes

(where templatefamily/ is the name of your Template Family).

Top of Page