Templates

About Templates

The content, structure and design/layout of the website are separated in Saurus CMS. This allows you to move the content objects between the sections and change the layout without affecting either the structure or the content.

Usually in websites there is a clearly visible content area which changes when you click around in menus while part of the page like the header, footer and menu system remain quite constant. Derived from this logic we use a system of page and content templates in Saurus CMS:

  • Page template defines the layout and design of the page surrounding content area.
  • Content template defines the functionality and layout of the content area.

When creating content, you can set both templates per each section, but normally there is one global page template defined for the website (each site/language can have it's own default templates) and you just select the content template – whether you would like to open article list, image gallery or 3rd party application for example when the menu item is clicked. It is sometimes wise to change the page template per section as well e.g. for creating a homepage or campaign section with different layout/design.

Note that you can change the current template for sections when your needs change. For example when you start with your new website there might be just a couple of news articles in a section. But when time passes there will be more and you might want to switch the content template to display latest headlines with chronological archive.

Bundled templates

Each Saurus CMS installation comes with the following bundled content templates suitable for most websites:

  • Articles: 1 column allows to create a list of articles with an option to turn on site visitor comments feature. Article full texts are shown by default but you can divide your texts in article editor to display only the lead with “read further” link.
  • Articles: 2 columns is the same as above, just there are two columns of articles.
  • Articles: bulleted list displays clickable headlines.
  • Articles: news with archive has an option to define the number of articles displayed with leads and the number to be displayed with headlines only. Link to chronological archive is also automatically inserted.
  • Documents lets you display all files in specific server folder. In addition you can add descriptive article at the beginning of the file list.
  • Forum forms a simple threaded discussion board.
  • Gallery allows to create page containing multiple albums. Each album displays images from specific server folder. Thumbnails and page-sized images are automatically created by the system.

In addition to these content templates there is also one page template bundled with the installation package which defines the design and layout visible when you first install the system.

Custom templates

Custom page- and content templates can be created using Saurus API. Please refer to Site development section in our support pages.

All bundled templates are open-source and can be modified to suit your needs. Developers should check the /extensions/saurus4 folder for those. Note that you should make a copy of our templates since we include newer and better versions with system updates and if you make changes those will be lost otherwise.

Object templates

In addition to page- and content templates, there are also object templates which display single object such as article details when accessed from search results. Object templates can not be chosen by content editor and are defined by developer during the site development phase.