I'm building a Drupal 7 type that has two distinct types of page, public ones and ones only shown to authenticated users, with entirely different templates. The choice of which template to use is done in the theme preprocess function.
Each of the two main templates has its own CSS, which needs to be placed in the header in the right place relative to the theme and base CSS. What is the best place to include these CSS files?
I can't add these sheets to the theme .info file, since those are applied to all templates. At the moment I am adding them in the theme preprocess function, but it seems like needless complexity, since the stylesheets are essentially static (all pages with the same template have the same 3 sheets). On the other hand hard-coding them in the template file (e.g. after the normal print $styles) seems like it is "not the drupal way" (tm), and also won't take advantage of CSS compression and caching.
So what is the right way?
you have no best place to insert your css file. You can just use drupal_add_css() anywhere you want. The css will be anyway write in the header.
Related
In Drupal one can basically style the elements, like the search box, or the basic page etc. and then put some content in the site and the resulting page will be generated. But what if you want one specific site (e.g. the index page) to be different? E.g. have a image as a background, a different navigation styling etc.
What's the best paractice way of doing this?
Best practice is to have a different theme which you can switch to by using hook_custom_theme() where you check the current path. Also make sure that your theme to switch to is enabled:
/**
* Implements hook_custom_theme().
*/
function YOUR_MODULE_custom_theme() {
# check path with arg(0)
# return theme name to switch to
return 'different_theme_machine_name';
}
Alternatively you can also try ThemeKey doing this out of the box with an interface & allowing you the specify rules.
If you need to change only the content(body) section of your page, use Disply Suite. You can create unique look and feel layouts for your body section of each page.
If you trying to change the complete layout of one page (eg: Services), Create new Content Type 'Services'. Then create a template file for this content type, You must name this template call page--services.tpl.php. And also you can overwrite the index page layout by creating page--front.tpl.php template. Done!
What you are saying you want to change is all styling. And you know you can do a page to look drastically different with CSS... and you can do it that way depending on your chosen Drupal theme.
Now, with the Chrome Inspector (or FF inspector) look at the body tag, it probably has many classes which indicates in what page you are, what type of node (if it's a node) or if it's an admin section, or an anonymous user.
Using those specific classes you can style a frontpage, or a view, or a node, or anything, without installing more modules... with some limitations because you can't change rendered HTML this way.
Finally, don't get scared by using modules in Drupal, it's how Drupal works and it works pretty well. The thing is to install the best tools to increase your productivity, and Drupal have excellent options to change your theming and content like Display Suite (like #BaikHo suggested).
Hope that helps.
PD: Using the less module and with custom your theme you can have LESS css which is considerably faster than using only CSS, and because it's integrated with Drupal you can theme make everything even faster. Give it a try.
I have a plugin installed that has its own layout overrides for different controllers. However I'm having trouble understanding the mechanism for modifying the paths.
In the plug-in controller if I tell it to use my layout
$this->layout = 'default_dashboard';
Which is in app/Views/Layout and references an image in app/webroot/default_images.
All the relative links work fine to default_images when I do this, but would like to use some of the Plugin template overides for other actions.
However if I modify the default.cpt file to include some of the images, like say a logo that is used in default_dashboard.ctp. It is unable to map to the same image location.
For example in default.ctp:
echo $this->Html->image('default_images/logo.png',array('alt' =>
'Logo','width'=>'284','height'=>'82'));
produces a path to /img/default_images/logo.png. The Plugin is configured to use the /img location, whereas I want to direct to /default_images in this case. I could make this ../default_images/logo.png, but this isn't very clean.
In addition I have js and css which is having a similar problem. Can someone please explain the mechanism for using a site-wide default.ctp so that it works with inherited plugin templates?
From hard coding the links into the template not using the Html Helper, I see that the browser's relative path is confused because of the routing. For example the first one works with the root specified, the second doesn't.
<img src="/default_images/logo.png" alt="works" width='284' height='82'>
<img src="default_images/logo.png" alt="lost" width='284' height='82'>
What's the best way to make sure that the Plugin layouts and non-plugin layouts can all find the correct path to /default_images ?
Following are the steps that you can follow to resolve relative path problem:
Create a file abc_constants.php in app\Config folder.
Include the file in app\Config\bootstrap.php
require_once(abc_constants.php);
abc_constants.php should contain:
define('HTTP_HOST', "http://" . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].'/');
define('SITE_URL', HTTP_HOST.'your_app_name/');
define('IMAGE_HTTP_PATH', SITE_URL.'app/webroot/default_images/');
Use these constants in your view file accordingly.
<?php echo $this->Html->image(IMAGE_HTTP_PATH.'logo.png',array('alt' => 'Logo','width'=>'284','height'=>'82'));
It looks a bit lengthy process at first time, but once implemented, you can use these constants in Ajax calls in view files, controller's code etc.
I have a fragment of html which is contained in a property of a templated EPiServer page, within that html there is an img tag which has a relative url in it.
When the page is viewed, I can see the src attribute of the tag has been altered to have the prefix /ProjectName/Templates/Pages/.
I understand that this is being done by HtmlRewriteToExternal so that image files that are stored alongside the aspx template (which does indeed live in Templates\Pages) are located correctly, however the image which is intended to be part of the html fragment is in my case actually stored under PageFiles/nnn/ (where nnn is actually the parent page's PageFolderID), and I need to somehow make the altered html reflect that.
I've created a class that inherits from FriendlyUrlRewriteProvider and registered my class. I can debug the application, and watch the requests go through the overridden methods, but I still can't see where the prefix is being added or get any idea how to change it. I can alter the src tag to a different relative path in my class, but the prefix is still being added.
I've read everything I can find on the EPiServer url rewriting, but can't find anything that hints as to where this prefix is being added or how to stop that or change it.
Things I've read:
http://blogs.interakting.co.uk/post/File-Extensions-and-URL-Rewriting-in-EPiServer.aspx
http://blog.fredrikhaglund.se/blog/2008/05/07/disable-episerver-urlrewriter-interference/ (this may contain the answer I'm looking for)
http://labs.kaliko.com/2010/11/prevent-episerver-urlrewrite.html
http://sourcecodebean.com/archives/episerver-friendly-urls-for-paginated-pages-and-why-the-asplinkbutton-must-die/510
http://tedgustaf.com/en/blog/2008/7/create-a-custom-url-rewrite-provider-for-episerver/
http://tedgustaf.com/en/blog/2011/4/publishing-plain-html-pages-in-episerver/
http://sdk.episerver.com/library/cms5/Developers%20Guide/Friendly%20URL.htm
http://sdk.episerver.com/library/cms6.1/html/T_EPiServer_Web_UrlRewriteModule.htm
http://labs.episerver.com/en/Blogs/Ruwen/Dates/111218/112064/112154/
http://world.episerver.com/Blogs/Magnus-Strale/Dates/2011/3/Do-we-really-need-yet-another-HTML-parser/
http://world.episerver.com/Blogs/Yugeen-Klimenko/Dates/2011/6/How-EPiServer-URL-Rewriting-works/
http://world.episerver.com/Modules/Forum/Pages/Thread.aspx?id=46869
I'm open to completely different solutions for what I'm actually trying to achieve, which is as follows:
I have multiple independent sets of static html files and related image / css / js files, which I'm trying to store / publish with EPiServer. The structure of each set looks something like
setfolder/
htmlfileA.html
htmlfileB.html
css/
styles.css
images/
piccy1.png
piccy2.png
js/
magic.js
I've figured that I should create an EPiServer page for the set, and then child pages for each html file, storing the html from the files in a property of the child pages. Currently I'm storing the related static files in the PageFiles of the relevant setfolder page, as that seems to be the most logically consistent place to put them.
It's hard to give the best solution without seeing it all infront of you. But one easy way is to alter the HTML-code when you print the property to the page.
Like <%= ChangeRelativeLinks(CurrentPage["HtmlCode"] as string) %>
And in the ChangeRelativeLinks(string htmlCode) you do a regexp or similar that changes relative links and images to the pagedir as an absolute path.
If you are storing the images in PageFiles which is a Virtual Path Provider you should be able to get the url to your file simply by using the API. On the PageData class (ie CurrentPage in your template) you have a method called GetPageDirectory() which gets the page folder.
You can read more about VPP concepts here:
http://sdk.episerver.com/library/cms6.1/Developers%20Guide/Core%20Features/File%20System/File%20System%20and%20VPPs.htm
No need for a url rewrite provider for this I think.
I have multiple templates which differs with each other only by few containers. The most complex one contains superset of all containers used in all other one thus to avoid creating multiple templates I created the most complex one in following format
<ui:insert name="container1">
some layout stuff (div and all)
<ui:insert name="container1Content">
</ui:insert></ui:insert>
defining nested insert for each container and content.
Now in client template based on what is needed
I turn off container which is not needed as
<ui:define name="container1/>
else if container is needed, just define content as
<ui:define name="container1Content">doSomething</ui:define>
Please let me know if you guys see any issues with this approach, any potential problem or alternate approach for similar scenario.
thanks a lot.
Maddy
Facelets's UI Insert tag is a templating tag thus yes you're correctly using it.
In a previous project, I implemented multiple layouts using Facelets and I inserted multiple placeholders using ui-insert, which allowed the applications using those layouts to customize parts of it (e.g., modify the page title, insert custom content in the head of the documents, ...
What is the best way to create regions in your layout similar to Wordpress's Widgets or Drupal Blocks? What is the best practice method of doing that in CakePHP?
If by regions you mean a special "content container" (never used WP/Drupal), then it's very easy.
There are several ways to accomplish this, but the one that came to my mind first was this:
Create a helper (or an entire plugin) to handle the "which content goes into which container" logic. Shouldn't be too hard to do because you have many Cake utility classes to help you out with that (such as the Configure class). This should obviously be configurable by the end user.
Create containers in your layout, example:
<div class="content-container" id="content-container-left">
<?php echo $yourHelper->outputContent("left"); ?>
</div>
Two options:
Content should be based on elements; or
Content should be based on custom plugins (which actually do their stuff and output the content)
Note: There are probably better ways to accomplish what you want, this is just the first that came to my mind. I'd recommend some pencil-and-paper planning before you actually code anything, it will improve your chances of finding the best way for your app.
I created a Sidebar Helper recently that you might find useful.
You define the content of the boxes in Cake elements, and then add them by calling ...
$sidebar->addBox(array('element'=>'my_sidebox_element');
... this would render the content of views/elements/my_sidebox_element
Alternatively you can specify te content of a box 'inline':
$sidebar->startBox(array('title' => 'My Inline Box'));
<p>blah <b>blah</b> <span>blah</span></p>
$sidebar->endBox();
The in your layout file call
echo $sidebar->getSidebar();
... and each of your boxes will be rendered as divs
Technically speaking this doesn't need to be used as a 'SideBar' - it ultimately depends on how you render the layout with CSS.
See the documented code for more details:
SidebarHelper on GitHub