Template Crash Course
Templates let web designers/webmasters integrate their site design with their membership site. To understand and use templates you don't need to know any programming. Templates are simple HTML pages. You can edit them using your favorite HTML editor such as FrontPage or DreamWeaver. You can also modify their HTML code using a Template Editor inside Admin Area. You may even download them into your local desktop and make changes using a text editor. Let's see a simple template:
| what you enter | what comes out | ||
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<html>
</body>
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<html>
</body>
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In the example above, you see a simple HTML web page with two tags on it: %%login%% and %%hobbies%%. PM Premium will look at this template, get user information from your membership database and replace these tags with the values this particular user has. So, your visitors will see this:
Special Tags:
In addition to simple tags, PM Premium also has some more advanced tags. For example, one of the most useful tags is %%no of members%%. You can insert this on any page in your member's area and it will be replaced by number of members on your membership database.
Most commonly used special tag is "TEMPLATE". Some parts in your site will always be same wherever you go. Such as navigation bar or copyright notice at the bottom. This usually makes it a pain to make small changes on these parts because every time you make a change, you need to go through all the pages that include this part. In such cases, you can use TEMPLATE tag. It basically lets you include template inside templates.
| what you enter | what comes out | ||
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%%TEMPLATE:header%%
%%TEMPLATE:footer%% |
<html>
</body>
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As you can see from the example above, our page is now much more simple and clean. We are not including the header and the footer in it, instead we just call them. "TEMPLATE:header" tag is replaced by the header template, and "TEMPLATE:footer" tag is replaced by the HTML code in the footer template.
| Contents of "header" template: |
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<html>
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| Contents of "footer" template: |
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</body>
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This was a crash course for using PM Premium templates. Keep reading and you will learn more about how to add/edit templates and what are the special tags in the following articles!
