Tempaltes in Cognifty are complete (X)/HTML files. Inside the template there are certain places where you want content to show up. Whever you want dynamic content you place specific PHP functions.

We can use an existing open source template to show the steps involved in creating a new template.

Start by downloading the template "Delicious Fruit" from oswd.org (http://www.oswd.org/design/preview/id/3691).

Create a new directory under templates, call it "fruit01".

(installation_home)/
          cognifty/
          media
          templates/
                 refresh01/
                 admin01/
                 fruit01/

Update your installation by changing the template.ini file under boot/local/. If there is not a file called template.ini, create a new one and make sure it looks like the following

[config]
default.name=fruit01
site.name=Your Site Name
site.tagline=""
use.rewrite=false
copyright.name=Mark Kimsal
ssl.port=443

The important value to change is the default.name value.

This particular template only comes with one layout. Some templates will have a base "index" layout, and other layouts; for example: one-column.html, two-column.html.

For each .html file, rename it to .html.php. Your directory should look like this.

fruit01/
      images/
      index.html.php
      style.css

If you refresh your browser, you should see a very broken web page. This is because most templates start with relative URLs for every link. We need to make them absolute URLs to work with a framework.

In cognifty, we can easily create absolute URLs by adding the PHP tag

<?=cgn_templateurl();?>

in front of any stylesheet or image which is part of the currently used template.

In our fruit01 example, we simply replace the top style sheet reference of:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" />

with:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<?=cgn_templateurl();?>style.css" />

If you refresh your browser on your Cognifty installation, you should see your downloaded template displaying properly. The only problem is that, it doesn't have your content in it.

The way we display content in Cognifty is by using template sections. The main part of any page is called 'content.main'. To display content.main, find the part in the template which starts showing content. Delete or comment-out the templates sample content and add the following line:

<? Cgn_Template::parseTemplateSection('content.main');?>

In our fruit01 example, this is right after the <div id="right"> tag around line 76. Keep the matching close div tag around line 110 and clear out everythign in between.

The last step which is required for general template setup is changing the page titles. In cognifty we have two titles to work with, the site name and the page title. The site name doesn't change on each page, but the page title does. In some sites, it is common to place the site's name after the page title so a user can easily recognize which site the page is from just by looking at the window title.

Here are the tags related to page titles and site names.

<title><?php echo Cgn_Template::getPageTitle();?> :: <?php echo Cgn_Template::siteName();?></title>

If your template made generous use of CSS styling, then any cognifty page will probably look pretty good in your new template. But, there might be some cases where you need to override the HTML structure of a default page in Cognifty. To do that, look at the "Overriding Modules" guide.