How to Create a Template

[Jordan]

Originally Posted by Xav

You mean like www .website.co.uk/index.php?page=home or something? Wouldn't that mean there would only be one page for SEO, or not?

You can use .htaccess and mod_rewrite to make your website SEO. Take a look at what we have done (thanks john!):

http://blog.codecall.net
which really is = http://www.codecall.net/index.php?option=com_myblog

And google will see the virtual sub-domain and give us higher rank points because of it.

Originally Posted by Xav

Why do you need the header.php and footer.php files? Can't I just have one main file - index.php - and within that I have the entire structure of the page - topbar, sidebar, footer at bottom - and just have a script block in the content section, to load the relevant content page, which contains only the content and no formatting?

That would work just fine. I like to have separate files for th e header/footer/index files because it is easier to edit IMO.

[Xav]

I see. Which is better - a single index.php with a GET variable, or a header/footer file embedded into every page?

[Jordan]

Your choice. I like the header/footer method still.

[Xav]

But both methods can use a header and footer file to store the contents. What I meant was, is it better to use the GET variable on index.php, which loads the other pages, or is it better to have separate pages that are loaded straight from the URL, which then load the header/footer files from there?

[orjan]

when talking about TPL, I guess you are thinking about PHP's project Smarty?
it's a great project if you want to pass data to an template and display it in different ways.

I used it on a webpage project a few years ago, and this way, the site programmers could make data available by smarty, and the design team could take the data they wanted to publish and make their own work more or less independent.

this way, we also could make the same page in different layouts for several sites, and the surfer wouldn't know we were using the same thing. (one tpl for each domain)

[antoniyo]

You will need some good images, by using html or css you can put images within code and continue look at output on your coding you will see your templates will have been completed.

[Xav]

I know. This thread is quite old, I've advanced loads since then.