Guide to Templates

From Newscloud

NewsCloud provides a powerful templating engine based on Smarty to let you customize the look and feel of your Journal and Group pages. Soon, you'll be able to build an entire news site with custom pages.

You can manage your templates in NewsCloud at Site Editor -> Templates page.

You can assign a template to your Journal at the Site Editor -> Journal .

There are a number of download templates and sub-templates that you can view as examples.

No PHP is allowed in our NewsCloud Smarty templates (except by special arrangement - email us), but other than that you can use any documented Smarty feature.

Smarty Documentation

Here are some example templates which show what is possible:

Default NewsCloud Journal
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Example 4
Example 5
Example 6
Example 7 
Example 8
Example 9

1 View Sample Templates
2 What Data is Available to Your Journal Page
3 What Data is Available to Your Group Page
4 How to place ads on Your Journal
5 List of Default Templates
6 List of Default Sub-Templates

View Sample Templates

The following links show you the code for a sample custom NewsCloud journal. It demonstrates how you can easily customize an HTML page to integrate Smarty variables form NewsCloud to display your journal in any way that you wish.

There is a parent template which includes sub-modules of other elements that you might want on your page. The parent page links to a CSS file that you design.

Sub-modules:

What Data is Available to Your Journal Page

$page->title - the title for the page $page->js - an array of javascript links to load on the page for the standard journal $page->css - an array of css links to load on the page for the standard journal

$nav->sort - the current sort for the journal view e.g. mostrecent, mostdiscussed, toprated, mostread $nav->current - the current page of the journal $nav->last - the last page number of the journal

$journal

$journalComments - an array of comments on stories from this journal

$myComments - an array of comments the journal user posted to NewsCloud

$friends - an array of the journal user's friends

$blog - an array of headlines from the journal user's blog

$storyCount - the number of stories on the page

$storyRows - an array of stories from the journal, each element has the following properties:

->title

->imageid

->description

->submit_member

->date