Template
A Template is a fundamental system entity that defines the HTML/XML structure of page asset in the CMS. Moreover, templates are essentially XHTML documents that contain the standard HTML tags and CSS that create what is commonly referred to as the "look and feel" of a web page. In addition to the normal HTML elements, templates also allow for special system tags to be embedded that define the content regions of the document. These content regions are the areas where new blocks of content can be placed in a "building block" manner to create a resulting XHTML web page. Likewise, XSLT stylesheets can also be applied to these regions against a block asset to create XHTML content as well.
Once a template has been created in the system, a user may choose to the edit the template again where they will be presented with an interface to perform these block/stylesheet assignments to the various regions that might be available in the particular template. Each region is designated by a special HTML comment tag or XML tag where MY-REGION-NAME is replaced with the name of the region. An important note to consider is that all templates must contain a region called DEFAULT where a page's "default" content will appear from the data that the end user enters into the editing environment for a page that inherits the template. If a DEFAULT region has not been created, the system will automatically create the region immediately after the opening <body> tag of the template document.
All templates must adhere to the standards that define well-formed XML documents. This includes, but is not limited to, maintaining lowercase tag names (i.e. <P> becomes <p>) and always appending opening tags with their closing tag counterparts (i.e. <p> cannot be left alone and must have an ending </p> tag after the paragraph content) unless the document type definition allows for the tag to be self-closing (i.e. <img xsrc="/cms/render/file.act?path=/myImage.jpg> becomes <img xsrc="myImage.jpg/> with the closing slash. Documents that are not well-formed can be passed through an optional XHTML filter that will perform a conversion of the document structure to adhere to the XHTML standard.For more information about well-formed XHTML documents, consult the W3C website below:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/