Themes & Page Templates
What is a Theme?
A theme is a collection of files and folders used by the cms to control
the visual look and layout of your website. At the very least a theme
consists of at least one page template file and usually other
associated web files such as image files, css files and javascript files.
Every theme has it’s own directory in the cms themes directory. In
most cases you will only ever need one custom theme for your
website. If you were doing a major re-design to your website in the
future you could update your existing theme or upload a new theme
so you can easily change and fall back to the old theme if you need
to.
To add a new theme:
1.
Create a new directory in the cms themes directory.
2.
Upload your page templates and associated files into your new
theme directory.
3.
Go to Configuration in the cms admin menu and change the
theme to your new theme.
If you are creating a new theme you can also copy the existing
default theme folder and rename it instead. This will ensure all
required style sheets and images necessary for the cms to display
properly are present in your new theme. If required images and style
sheets do not exist in a custom theme folder, the ones in the default
folder are used instead, therefore files in the default theme folder
should not be modified or removed as they are used as defaults if a
custom theme is missing a critical file.
What is a Page Template?
A page template is essentially a html web page file. It is used to
determine page design, layout and positioning for dynamic content
served by the cms. A page template can also be a php file.
You should always have at least one page template file in your theme
named default.htm or default.php
When you add or modify a category or product in the cms you can
select what page template to use. This determines the page design
and layout for this particular page when it is served by the cms. With
this approach each uploaded page template can be used many times
over by the cms to display multiple web pages on your website.
To display dynamic content from the cms a page template needs to
have a special tag {page_content} present somewhere in the page.
For more information on special tags see the page template tags help
section.
Changing & Updating Page Templates
If you make changes to your page templates in just upload them
again into your theme directory in the cms, but remember to login to
the cms admin area first. The cms will automatically update any page
templates you’ve uploaded but only when logged into the admin area.
If you upload new page templates and you’re not logged in as admin
when you do so, don’t worry, just login to the admin area as soon as
you can and the cms will automatically import the new pages that
were uploaded.
CMS Help - Advanced - Themes & Page Templates