{"id":51,"date":"2012-01-12T17:41:31","date_gmt":"2012-01-13T00:41:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pln.lanecc.net\/webteam\/?p=51"},"modified":"2014-12-10T20:39:08","modified_gmt":"2014-12-10T20:39:08","slug":"upgraded-templates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.lanecc.edu\/webteam\/2012\/01\/12\/upgraded-templates\/","title":{"rendered":"Upgraded Templates"},"content":{"rendered":"

You may have noticed the new contact page<\/a> on the Lane website. This is the first page that we’ve moved, or ported, to Drupal (only 11,999 to go!). You’re going to see many more pages start looking like this soon, so let’s spend a few minutes going over some vocabulary, and then talk about what’s different.<\/p>\n

First, let’s talk porting<\/a>. This just means moving from one platform to another. For example, say we made a really awesome video game for one console, perhaps an XBox. The game is finished, it works great, and it’s tons of fun. But we can’t play on any other console, like a Wii or a Playstation. To use another platform, we’d need to modify the game for that other system. Because the content of the game is done, porting takes a lot less time than starting from scratch, but we still need to find all the little differences between the systems. We’re doing something similar. The content of our website is done, we just need to move (port) it from one platform (static HTML pages) to another (Drupal<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The second thing we need to talk about is templates. As we port the content of the website, we’ll be putting it in a big database<\/a>. When it’s time for Drupal to show you a webpage (like the contact page), Drupal grabs the content of that webpage from a database, inserts it into a template, and returns the dressed up webpage to you. So a template simply says how the page is going to look. This way, look and feel is totally separate from content – we can change either the design or the content without impacting the other one. Of course, the big important question is, “What’s the template going to look like?”<\/p>\n

We don’t know yet. There’s lots of people (Faculty, Students, and Community members) involved in the process of figuring that out. But, figuring out what the webpage is going to look like takes more than a couple of days. In fact, it will take until at least summer. So we need a temporary template that we can use with Drupal, so that pages can be ported while we decide how they’re going to look.<\/p>\n

The contact page has the temporary template. It looks a little (ok, a lot) like this:<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>This should look similar to the existing Lane pages, but it incorporates some subtle changes and updates that I couldn’t resist putting in. Here’s a cheat sheet of things to look for:<\/p>\n