Default directory for page views is hidden/tpl/pages/. Simple sites that have few pages and don't require multilanguage support can store all of their TPL files in this dir. Tangra framework based sites are meant to be bigger and with a lot of functionality. That is the reason classic TPL files structure to be a bit more complicated in order to support multilanguage and thematic grouping. Please note that classic structure is not mandatory - you may use whatever structure you see fit.
Classic TPL files structure is (here we will suppose that site's default language is english (en)):
- hidden/tpl/pages/ - place for _switch.tpl file and potentially for TPL files for pages that require different behaviour than provided by _switch.tpl. _switch.tpl content look like
{include file="`$_path``$_language`/template_`$_language`.tpl"}and its sole purpose is to switch accordingly to language to the correct main TPL file (see bellow). If you don't provide page specific TPL file here named like page_name.tpl where page_name is (system) name of your page then by default _switch.tpl will be used. - hidden/tpl/pages/en/ - place for TPL files for english language. Each language must have its own dir. By default two language subdirectories are created in hidden/tpl/pages/ when site is installed: en/ and bg/ (bulgarian). TPL files that contain language specific information as texts, formating (lang direction), images with text - have to be placed in their respective language subdir.
- hidden/tpl/pages/en/template_en.tpl - Main TPL file. Such files contain common parts of pages' HTML such as html, head, body and other tags. The idea behind existence of this file is to avoid duplication of HTML (which makes maintenance much easier). Responsibility of Main TPL file is to
- hidden/tpl/pages/en/page_name/ - directory for page specific files. page_name stands for actual page name like
- hidden/tpl/pages/en/page_name/page_name_en_title.tpl - contains just title of the page. This file can be included both in HEAD in TITLE element and in the content area in H1 tag
- hidden/tpl/pages/en/page_name/page_name_en_default.tpl - contains HTML for default view.
Let's take closer look at template_en.tpl. By default when Jabba site template is installed it contains:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<base href="{$_base_url}" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>My site - {include file="`$_path``$_language`/`$_subdir``$_page`/`$_page`_title_`$_language`.tpl"}</title>
{foreach from=$_additional_csses item=_css}
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/{$_css}" />
{/foreach}
</head>
<body>
{if $_page != 'index'}<h1>{include file="`$_path``$_language`/`$_subdir``$_page`/`$_page`_title_`$_language`.tpl"}</h1>{/if}
{include file="`$_path``$_language`/`$_subdir``$_page`/`$_page`_`$_view`_`$_language`.tpl"}
</body>
</html>
Above you can see that *title_en.tpl is included two times - first in the TITLE tag and then in H1 tag. That way you avoid duplication of text. Here is schematic representation of classic structure:
It is not mandatory that you use exactly that scheme for template_??.tpl. For example you can use different titles for TITLE and H1 by including different TPL files like this:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<base href="{$_base_url}" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>My site - {include file="`$_path``$_language`/`$_subdir``$_page`/`$_page`_title_head_`$_language`.tpl"}</title>
{foreach from=$_additional_csses item=_css}
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/{$_css}" />
{/foreach}
</head>
<body>
{if $_page != 'index'}<h1>{include file="`$_path``$_language`/`$_subdir``$_page`/`$_page`_title_content_`$_language`.tpl"}</h1>{/if}
{include file="`$_path``$_language`/`$_subdir``$_page`/`$_page`_`$_view`_`$_language`.tpl"}
</body>
</html>
In above example TPL files for TITLE tag will have to be named *_title_head_en.tpl and files for content area *_title_content_en.tpl.
template_??.tpl files can become large too. It such cases it is recommendable to split them. For example you may want to create separate files for header, footer, main menu, etc.