Publishing Templates Curiosity

[Raccroc]

Why does ASM divide the publishing templates into three physically separated sections (Head/Body/Footer) instead of just using html elements for each section?

Due to the small size of the windows when they are divided this way (and with no way to expand or full screen like in other parts of ASM) they are harder to read and see what is going on. This setup also makes it harder to cut & paste (three separate cut & pastes to get code out and then you have to be careful to put things back in right places once they are edited). Moreover, the and tags are still present in all of the example templates, so it doesn't even appear to replace the need for that in practice.

I've never seen an HTML editor physically separate these elements like this and it certainly adds an inconvenience factor; so I am just curious what problem having it this way solves?

[bobintetley]

You're probably only looking at templates in terms of the animal_view service call, where a template is used to output one record.

If you use any of the service calls that are prefixed with html_ (eg: html_adoptable_animals, html_adopted_animals) they use the template to construct a full page. The body section is repeated for each record that is to be output.

You can make the active code editor go full screen by pressing F11 or CTRL+SHIFT+F

[bobintetley]

I'd add that the main reason it's the way it is is historic, and you're right that templates could just be one document with tokens or tags to separate the sections rather than physically separating them into multiple editors.

[Raccroc]

Thank you for the info. Figured it was mostly a legacy thing, but thought it better to ask instead of just assume.

Basically, I started with the littlebox template and completely rewrote it to suit my needs (decided to use "publish" animalflags for various dog status and use the html_flagged_animals filters to display the group that I want on each web page. Having to edit within that small Body box on the littlebox template was a PITA, so I did the vast majority of my editing in an outside editor. Don't know if that is the best way, but at least I got everything working (except for dynamically sizing the height of the iframe to fit all images without scrollbars... that one still escapes me).

Appreciate the F11 or CTRL+SHIFT+F tip; didn't even think to try that. Would have helped quite a bit, although the use of that ends up breaking the search function between sections (Ido a lot of jumping back and forth doing CSS styling in the section while modifying the .