Specifying General Information About Template

An important step in creating a template is to specify basic technical information about the template in order for the template to be correctly recognized by Sitebuilder. For that purpose you should create a special file named info.xml that will contain all relevant information about the template, and put it into the template directory.

The structure of the info.xml file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<template id="yourCompany-business-001" version="1.0" caption="Business site" formatVersion="4" keywords=" business books" category="Business" >

  <themes default="yellow">

    <theme id="green" caption="Green theme"/>

    <theme id="yellow" caption="Yellow theme"/>

    <theme id="orange" caption="Orange theme"/>

  </themes>

  <compatibility>

    <screen>

      <minwidth>800</minwidth>

    </screen>

    <browsers>

      <browser>MS IE 6.0</browser>

      <browser>Mozilla FireFox 1.5</browser>

      <browser>Opera 8</browser>

    </browsers>

    <modules>

      <module>Blog</module>

      <module>ImageGallery</module>

    </modules>

  </compatibility>

</template>

The first line, called XML declaration, defines the version of XML and the charset used in the document.

The root element of the document is template. It has the following attributes:

• id. This attribute contains the name of a template. The name of a template should start with the name of your company, so that the template would be easily identified in Sitebuilder. The template name should coincide with the name of the directory containing the template content. If a template pack is designed to be also used in Sitebuilder for Linux/Unix, then the templates' names should contain only latin characters, numerical digits, underscores ( _ ), dots, and dashes.
• version. This attribute contains the template version.

  Version number consists of 2 digits:

  • First (1) – the number of times a template was recoded with the same design.
  • Second (0) – the number of hot fixes.
• formatVersion. This attribute contains the version of the created template pack. If you create a template pack using Sitebuilder SDK v. 4.0, then put "4" into this section. If you use SDK v. 3.2, then there is no need to include the formatVersion section in the info.xml file, because the format's version will be automatically defined as "3" during template pack compilation.
• caption. This attribute contains the description of a template. This can be any text of your choice, for example, "Travel company".
• keywords. This attribute contains the list of keywords that a user might search on to find your template at the Design step of the Wizard. Therefore, provide keywords which best describe you template. This attribute is optional.
• category. This attribute specifies the category a template belongs to, for example, "Business". It may contain blank value or be absent.

The template element has the following child elements:

• themes. A child element of the themes element is an element that has the same name as the color theme directory in the template. This element contains two attributes.
  • default. It defines default theme. The attribute is optional.
  • detachableHeader. Defines what image is to be substitutable by Sitebuilder interface in case multiple images are defined in the template header. The attribute is optional. For details, refer to the Customizing Headers section.

  The theme elements should contain two attributes:

  • id. The id attribute contains the identifier of a color theme.
  • caption. The caption attribute contains the description of a color theme. This can be any text of your choice, e.g. "Green color theme".
• compatibility. This element describes the properties of a template. Currently, these properties are just assigned to a template, but in the next version of Sitebuilder, the properties will be displayed to the end-users selecting a template for their site. This element and all its child elements are optional.

  The compatibility element has its own child elements:

  • screen, which in its turn has the child element minwidth, which contains minimal width of a template without horizontal scrolling.
  • browsers. The browsers element contains the list of browsers' names and versions compatible to the template.
  • modules. If you create the template specifically for certain Sitebuilder module(s), specify the name(s) of the intended module(s) in this section.

  The modules element can have the following values:

  • Blog
  • eShop
  • Forum
  • ImageGallery
  • Guestbook
  • Login
  • Feedback
  • RssReader
  • Voting
  • AreaMap
  • FlashIntro