hello

for instance. That's the most typical use. Why is a preamble needed? You may want to hide some tags if there are no entries, because wouldn't want to have an empty container div. > **The content (and the tags) within a preamble WON'T be displayed if there is no content to show for the inner tag (so, if the {entry} block returns no content).** ===== Iterator tags: entry ===== Now, an {entries} (or {entry_block}) block expects to contain a {entry} block. An entry block is an _iterator_ . Which means that is a "template" for an entry block. Usually you have an N number of entries for each page. You just put a sample for ONE, and Smarty/FP will repeat it N times. ===== Dollar tags ===== Dollar tags are actually the way smarty handles output for a variable. Variables are set by the programmer, who exposes some parts to be printed on screen so that the designer can put them where he wants. So, when a tag contains a dollar, it means it contains a variable; this is the same as doing actually something like There are many predefined variables you can use, and most of them come from Smarty itself; you can read more about them on the [[http://smarty.php.net|manual]]. Some are generate by flatpress, and are globally available like the special {$flatpress} array, of which the fields contains config informations. Some tags are **not** globally available and can be reached only from within an iterator tag; these variables are proper of the iterator itself. For instance {entry} generates {$subject}, {$date}, {$content}, and some others; you can see all of them opening a complete theme; we're not going to explain them all here. * **$subject** contains, guess it, the title of your post * **$content** is the html-formatted post (this will change a bit with the next version, we will use a lot of modifiers, read below and the ML for more info) * **$date** contains a UNIX timestamp a UNIX timestamp is an integer which counts time in seconds, starting from January, 1st 1970 +000; We can extract a readable date using the smarty "modifier" |date_format. ===== Smarty modifiers ===== A **modifier** is a function which takes as argument the var it follows and returns a string. The PHP homologue is something like {$var|modifier} ---> **date_format** follows the php time format rules, and you can find more on its syntax on the smarty manual as well. Now you have a barebone template. Let's spicy it up a bit. ===== Other useful entry-related tags ===== You may want for instance to have next/back links :




{entries}



    {entry}

        {$subject}

        Published on {$date|date_format}

        {$content}

    {/entry}




    {nextpage}{prevpage}


{/entries}

Here they are, before the {/entries} closing tag and after the iterator block. There are technical reasons for it to be there, but we won't explain them now. Our header is still a bit boring: hello ok, let's change it into {header} This way FP will auto generate an appropriate title for each page. ===== The include tag ===== All of your * **comments.tpl** which display the post+comment page * **default.tpl** which displays the "dialog-like" pages, like login * **static.tpl** static pages * **admin.tpl** admin area * **preview.tpl** which displays the preview in the admin panel "write entry" etc... you will understand that if some "central" content is always going to change in your templates, some will not, and that's why we usually remove the header and the footer and we create a header.tpl and footer.tpl These are just conventional names, we could choose "foo.tpl" and "bar.tpl" as well. The important thing is that we can call them within our "master" templates using the {include} directive. Ok, let's imagine you have now:


header.tpl

-----------------------





hello

and the rest of the page:


index.tpl

-------------------------

{*

    hi I'm a comment, and what follows

    is an include directive

*}


{include file=header.tpl}

{entries}



    {entry}

       {$subject}

        Published on {$date|date_format}

        {$content}



    {/entry}


{/entries}

This will tell smarty "hey, in the same dir of the templates look for a file called header.tpl and put it here!". you can even use relative (or absolute) paths; let's imagine you have a tpl dir in your theme dir: {include file=tpl/header.tpl} however, we conventionally put tpls in the "root" dir, and we put misc stuff in res/; images should go in imgs/ (yes flatmaas2 called it "images" I should change it ;)) file= admin also a special "URL-like" syntax. file=shared:my_template.tpl will look for a template called my_template.tpl in fp-interface/sharedtpls/ This is used to display special administrative controls/links or the comment form. ===== Adding some color ===== let's move back to the theme dir; create a res/ directory and put there a style.css; now you can open it and and style a bit your page. Of course you can add divs (and tags) as you like to be able to style whatever and in whichever way you want. ===== Adding widget bars ===== Finally, let's go with the final important reason for which you're going crazy: how the heck can I have a three-column layout? Ok, to start put in the end your index.tpl the widget code:





{widgets pos=left}



{$subject}

   {$content}



{/widgets}






{widgets pos=right}




{$subject}

   {$content}



{/widgets}

Notice you don't have a preamble as you usually always want to see the divs of the right/left bar Now you'll probably have an empty bar on the left, because FP uses just the right one :p Once you're done with the admin panel you can populate the left bar as well (if you don't want to wait you can edit the plugins.conf.php and widgets.conf.php you find in fp-content/config/ by hand because that's actually what the admin panel does...). Finally you will probably want to have the widgets on each page of your design (excepted maybe the control panel) so move the whole bar in a widgets.tpl and put in index.tpl the directive {include file=widgets.tpl} Here you go. Now you're almost ready to start exploring th FP theme engine.