I'm a pretty experienced Grails developer, but most of my experience has been with using grails for serving up JSON/XML to a flex app and some relatively simple HTML websites.
I've been diving deeper into using the sitemesh integration in grails and I'm struggling a little to find best practices for some more complex configurations, and I'm curious if there are any good tutorials or examples out there. The original Sitemesh website isn't that useful as the tags it talks about aren't directly exposed in grails.
A google search is mostly showing old mailing list posts and some vanilla sitemesh stuff which is helping me to move a little further along, but it's a lot of trial and error.
I fully understand how the basic g:layoutTitle, g:layoutHead, and g:layoutBody tags work. Those are easy and well documented.
The kinds of things that I'd like to see examples for:
g:applyLayout - the documentation on this is weak and I don't fully understand the uses suggested in the main docs. How is this different than setting the meta name='layout' content='foo' property?
g:pageProperty - some better examples on how to pull and use properties into the main template by setting the values as meta tags in the page that's being decorated. The grails docs on pageProperty show only the onload attribute from the body being brought forward. I think you can also use meta tag values here as well, anything else?
can you use multiple levels of sitemesh layouts? My testing seems to make me think that I can't, but that seems to reduce reusability. I think that the answer here is some usage of the g:applyLayout, but that's where I'm struggling the most.
the g:pageProperty is a very powerful, but very poorly documented thing. Lets say in my layout I specify where to put some content like this:
<html>
<body>
<g:pageProperty name="page.header" />
</body>
Now in my page I can specify some content:
<content tag="header">
<!-- header -->
</content>
Sitemesh will take the content tag, regardless of actual position in the HTML of the page and place it where it needs to go in the flow of the layout.
Even better, if within my page I render a template that also specifies a content area with a tag of "header", it will overwrite the first declaration, and it will be the template's content that will be rendered in the final layout.
Well, I can answer a bit:
Your first and third questions are related, as you can't chain layouts using the meta tag.
Your final page should have a meta tag as you suggest, but if you want to layer a layout on top of another layout, you put a g:applyLayout tag at the top of the child layout, pointing at the parent.
In your edit.gsp, you'd have:
<meta name="layout" content="editTemplate" />
and in editTemplate.gsp, you'd have:
<g:applyLayout name="baseTemplate" >
<!-- the html for the editTemplate -->
</g:applyLayout>
so edit.gsp would use editTemplate.gsp, which would use baseTemplate.gsp as a base layout. You can chain those as needed.
I haven't used g:pageProperty at all, so I can't throw you better examples there, sorry.
The Sitemesh together with Grails is a very very powerful feature. The more I use it - the more I love it. You can decorate any part of our web site: you can have layout for error messages, tooltips, news lines, comments, etc, etc. Just to note that you can do even that with in your pages and have multiple levels of decoration (no <content> needed):
/view/layout/inline-error-message.gsp
<span class="errorMessageInSomeFancyBox">
<span class="errorIcon"></span>
<g:layoutBody />
<span>
/views/book/create.gsp
<%-- let's decorate our error message with some fancy box --%>
<g:applyLayout name="inline-error-message">${some.error.message}</g:applyLayout>
See our Rabbtor Showcase App for a few very good examples on
creating nested layouts
rendering templates
applying layouts to specific parts of a page
. This app is actually a showcase for our tool Rabbtor which enables using GSP outside Grails but parts related with Sitmesh are also valid for Grails.
Related
i am very confused right now. I came from Wordpress,and laravel frameworks, and now i am assigned to develop Joomla! project.I thought i can easily manage to create custom template in joomla. I have been reading a lot of articles and documentation. I've manage to create a template and display modules.
But now, i need to start digging the right way to display the content and manage it in Joomla! back-end.
Here's my problem. I have home page (Long page) and inner pages (Short page). Here's the structure of my homepage
<html>
... header links and other necessary tags
<body>
<section class="homepageonlysection1">
<div>
image and text here! (i made this as 1 modules in Custom HTML)
</div>
<div>
video here (i made this as 1 modules in Custom HTML)
</div>
</section >
<section class="homepageonlysection2">
<div>
form here (i made this as 1 modules in Custom HTML)
</div>
<div>
image and text here! (i made this as 1 modules in Custom HTML)
</div>
</section>
<section class="homepageonlysection3">
<div>
image and text here! (i made this as 1 modules in Custom HTML)
</div>
<div>
video here (i made this as 1 modules in Custom HTML)
</div>
</section>
</body>
</html>
and this is my inner pages
<html>
... header links and other necessary tags
<body>
<section class="innerpagessectiononly1">
<div>
Article Content (i will do as jdoc:inlucde type="component")
</div>
</section>
<section class="innerpagessectiononly2">
<div>
sidebar Content (i will do this as 1 modules in Custom HTML)
</div>
</section>
</body>
</html>
Those template are really different.
Problem 1 : How can i make my inner pages if my homepage structure is very different? Or
Problem 2 :How can i make display my section (homepageonlysection) in home page only and display (innerpagessectiononly) in inner pages only?
Problem 3 : Is there a Advance Custom Field (ACF for wordpress) as joomla extension ?
Please advice. Any help would be appreciated.
One thing I recommend is really digging into the core templates (both front and backend) to understand how things work. In particular Isis the backend template illustrates a number of complex options.
Now, overall I think you probably do not want to do the homepage the way you are doing it, since it will be very inflexible and hard to change. On the other hand it's possible that you want it inflexible and hard to change. In reality you may not need to have separate layouts at all or the differences may be minimal and may not require any special code at all.
So, first, this document explains how to determine if you are on the home page. So you can clearly pretty easily test for that and then enclose your two separate designs in the true and false conditions. This is basically what you see in Isis. In your case you can place one or more module position inside the condition. In fact you could make it so this layout does not even load a component. Then you can just make an empty article and make the home page a single article link to that empty article. (I would put that article into a separate landing page category)
A second option if you really want to have a totally different design on the home page is to make a totally separate template for the home page. If say you called this "my home template" and your other template "my everywhere else template" what you could do is make "my everywhere else template" the default and then on the default (homepage) menu item assign the "my home template" template. In this special template you can even use the module jdoc:include (instead of modules) to call specific modules in highly customized ways. I would suggest you go read the docs on that. You can even set the options and the chrome right in the template.
However, I think you are missing a key feature of Joomla. In your question you have not said what kind of menu link you are planning to use for your home page. The third option is that for the homepage you use the same template but a specific alternate layout that you use for this page. For your case what you would most likely want to do, assuming that you are not using the featured articles layout type anywhere else (i.e. that no articles are marked featured), is to make your homepage using an articles > featured menu link. Then you can assign all the modules you made to the home page via the menu modules tab. Depending on how your module positions are in the template it could just be that they will float up.
Your design is not a particularly unusual or complex however. Many Joomla homepages consist of multiple structured sections of text and media. These are made with menu types such as "featured" and "category blog." The advantage of using these menu types is that then you are storing your content in articles and these are much easier to manage. ALso you don't have to give someone access to the module manager in order to allow them to edit these snippets of content. So the fourth and possibly best approach is to use one of these standard content layouts. For example if you were to make a category called "home page content" and then put the content for each of the modules in a separate article and (assuming you want a consistent structure) put the image for each of them into the structured intro text image field, you can then make a "category blog" menu link to the "home page content" category as you default (home page) menu link. Then what you can do is make one or more layout override for those individual items that gives the exact layout you want. Assuming that they are all the same, you can select that as a alternate layout in your menu link. Actually even if they are not all the same you can just do a more complex layout instead of looping through the list and doing the same thing for each article, do each one separately.
A fifth approach is to use an alternative layout instead of an alternate layout. The difference there is that you would give the layout a new name (in either the category or featured view) and then you will have the additional flexibility of being able to create options in the menu link that are different than those for the normal category/featured views. It's up to you to decide what you might want to add there.
There are other options as well, because Joomla has a very strong template community and they like to have a lot of flexibility. But that will get you started.
I am a bit confused on the best way to handle this problem:
My web site needs read-only static web pages (typically the About part of a web site) with 2 simple constraints:
they need to be translated
they need to have flexible layout: to incorporate base headers/footers, floating images and/or tables, and non-interactive elements (like a bootstrap carousel).
Several solutions that I have thought about:
I can of course directly write HTML files but the translation part will be awkward (a lot of <h1>, <ul>, <li> and <p> which are of no interest to the translator).
I can use Django flatpages with some markup languages but I lose a lot of flexibility (for instance template tags are not recognized)
Use generators like Hyde, but it seems quite overkill for my needs and internationalization seems a bit difficult
Does someone have other propositions that I can look into ?
Thanks !
Use django-cms, it has a Page model that can be translated and has a very smart plugin system to add many content-types into every page.
I use it a lot and it's very easy and yet powerful
For completeness and fairness, here's a full list of available CMS packages for Django.
for a much simpler solution, I would create a model called "Page" with lets say title and text fields.
The title and the text fields I would register to django-modeltranslation which will handle the translation issue.
For the text field i would use TinyMCE which let you insert basically any HTML you want so you can do whatever you need.
I've had a look at some really good website layout and design using Django, pinterest, (former)curse, disqus, and the django design template lpoks impressive.
Was just pondering thoughts as to were it is necessary to add css3 or html5 to enhance page design and interaction or would using Django features for eg. divs and headers, boxing text good enough or even better visually.
Lets for argument sake, say we are developing an extensive auction site like e-bay or networking site like facebook.
Django doesn't have any design. There is zero front-end included, so that if you made a template page and added divs/headers/whatnot in there it would have absolutely no custom formatting whatsoever beyond the specifications of vanilla HTML.
So if you want to design a site like Pinterest you'll definitely need your own CSS and HTML.
So, django make a view with HTML and CSS (you will have some div..) but no div will be declared and you will have a white page withall things aligned to left..
It is not complicated, if you want a beautiful site (or just not hugly :)) you will need both html and css, but not last versions if you don't wand (but its better..)
How can I include a page from magnolia into a magnolia template script?
In the template script with I can access data from a specific page, but how can I load that page into the template?
Let's say I have 2 pages each with its own template. Page 1 contains in its tree page 2. I want to include in the template script of page 1, page 2, but doesn't work.
Thank you very much :)
UPDATED
What I actually want to do is include my header in all of my project's pages. But I don't want to put it as a paragraph, because if I ever want to change my header, I'll have to edit all the project's pages.
So what I try to do and I don't know if this is the correct approach is to create a page template for the header. This template won't include any , or css, it's just the code for the header.
The next thing I want to do is create a page in magnolia with that model to be the header.
Next I'd like to include the page I've just created in my main template model for the project, but I can't figure how to do that.
I am new to Magnolia cms and initially I tried creating my demo site using stk. The only problem was that I couldn't use jsp as a scripting language, or at least I couldn't find any solution on the internet. I don't really know freemarker, but that's not really a big problem. I'm really reluctant in using freemarker because maybe in the future in a more complex project I might need some features that freemarker doesn't support, but jsp does. I'd like to build my site using jsp if that's possible with magnolia.
I'm sorry for this long update, but if anyone has any suggestions on what a best practice could be and if I could implement what I want in jsp I would be really grateful.
Thanks again for you time :)
If you're using the STK then see this guide on content-reuse.
If not have a look at the cms tag-lib, especially the tags cms:loadPage and cms:setNode with which you can get a piece of content and set it as a JSP/JSTL variable and then render it using cms:includeTemplate.
A common scenario is to 'inherit' content from the parent page, the header is an excellent example of this. What you do is for an area you walk up the content hierarchy and render everything from the parent pages in their area with the same name. This way the header which you've only added to the top page is included in all its children.
Another option is to a have special page which simply holds things to be included in other pages. Like header, footer and banners that should go in the side pane of some pages.
Including a page within another page doesn't really work. Page 2 already has its own <html> tags, its own <script> tags, and its own CSS, so including it wholesale into another page just simply doesn't make sense.
You do, however, have a couple of options:
Use an iframe. This will allow you to include the entirety of Page 2 in a region of Page 1.
More recent versions of Magnolia will allow you to render an individual paragraph, which you could then include in another page. (For example, you can see a single paragraph from http://demopublic.magnolia-cms.com/demo-project/about/subsection-articles.html at http://demopublic.magnolia-cms.com/demo-project/about/subsection-articles/article/main/0.html.) This requires knowing a bit about the way the data is structured, but is a pretty useful way to be able to selectively extracts bits of a page.
You can use the Magnolia API in your model class to pull data from sub-pages, and then make it available to your view template. This is the approach the STK uses to build teasers that include content from the pages they reference, and is probably the most powerful and flexible approach, but it does require actually writing some Java code. (See http://documentation.magnolia-cms.com/templating/stk/templating.html and http://documentation.magnolia-cms.com/reference/templating.html for details of how to use this approach.)
(Added after question was edited) The footer functionality that's included with the STK does almost exactly this. You might be interested to take a look at that and see how it's implemented there.
Hope that helps a bit!
I'm working on a Liferay 6 project, and part of the project is to create a new layout template to be used for the entire site as the default. Liferay's own wiki is very sparse on documentation about layout templates, and I haven't had better luck with Google searches or even here on SO.
I did find one article ( Liferay - Layout for each pages ) that sort of answers the question, but it seems like it might be overkill. In that question, the goal was to change the template based on the page, so the answer was to create a Hook and use that to set the template on the fly as needed. Here, I just want to have this custom template be the default for all pages, all the time, which is why I think the answer to that other question might be more than is really needed.
If anyone has the answer to this puzzler, please let me know. Thanks!
-- JLM --
OK, I've figured out my confusion. Liferay has two types of layout templates -- templates that are part of a theme, which is one type of Liferay project, as well as actual layout template projects themselves.
The templates in a theme are where you set up the overall page layout for the site. The main page template, named portal_normal.vm, is a full web page with an <html> tag, a <head> and <body>, etc. Other templates in the theme are usually page fragments.
A Layout Template, on the other hand, is only for laying out the portlets in the main content region of your page (which is defined by tags in your Theme's template files). It is always a fragment and can only have <div> elements or a <table> for laying out the portlets.
Fortunately, this actually makes answering my question very easy, at least in the context that I needed. Per Liferay's documentation at http://www.liferay.com/community/wiki/-/wiki/Main/How+To+Change+Liferay+Default+Theme :
Note: As of 6.x, you cannot just use the theme id specified in the liferay-look-and-feel.xml. Instead, go to Control Panel->Plugins Configuration->Click on theme of interest->note the Plugin ID and use that [as the value for default.theme.id in portal-ext.properties]
I hope this helps some other people trying to figure this out!