Template Documentation

[l4rth]

Hi,

I am currently trying to customize the templates to meet my webpage design and I am missing some Documentation on what is content and what is detail and how the templates work together. By now I tried to change the ... yeah I don't have a name, the -template, where title, written by, the whole content etc. is shown. But my changes have influence on the list, and maybe other things.

What I was expecting:

entry_detail_base.html -> The Entries detail view (Title, meta information, everything of the post)
entry_list.html -> A list of entries.

Maybe you can give me a hint or something on what file i could take as base file, and what's the difference between content and detail?

[bittner]

You can take a look at django-organice-theme, which customizes Zinnia to integrate nicely into a django CMS driven platform.

The source code demonstrates how to

• change the basic appearance (base.html)
• and the different displays of entries (base, list, day, month, year),
• customize specific tags

Maybe also helpful: Documentation and threads

• Customize Zinnia's look and feel
• Use base.html of project foo_bar

[l4rth]

Thank you for the django-organice-theme link. I have read the customize documentation but it only tells me how to override templates and which to overwrite but not how they are composed which i think is not trivial.
For example, changes in the entry_detail_base.html seem to have no impact on the design. Changes on _entry_detail_base.html results in changes but for both list AND detail view which should not happen.

What I think no is:

entry_detail_base like _entry_detail_base is meta-data like the title, author, tags, etc.
it is base for lists AND content and one particular Entry post is composed together of the detail template and a content template. If this is true, then i have to ask why?

[l4rth]

I now tried to setup my templates.

Is there really no way to split the detail view from the list view?

To me it looks like a essential use case that classes and html for the list differs from classes and html for the detail view.

[bittner]

Yes, the entry_detail_base vs. _entry_detail_base and entry_detail vs. _entry_detail cases are a beast. I guess this is historically grown and cannot be changed easily without breaking backward compatibility in the templates.

Part of the "problem" is that with the content_template variable there is some flexibility built-in (that I'm wondering who needs it). The rendering is done in blocks such as

{% include object.content_template with object_content=object.html_content %}

{% include object.content_template with object_content=object.html_preview continue_reading=1 %}

Examples:

• entry_detail_base
• entry_search
• entry_list

In the latter example, the continue_reading flag is used for deciding whether to show a preview or the full article. html_content and html_preview are properties of the entry model that handle the (potential) conversion to HTML and the necessarily complex truncation of HTML.

I think most people need to modify the _entry_detail_base.html template and don't need to touch entry_detail_base.html ever, for example. I believe some renaming of the template files would make things much much clearer. -- At the cost of breaking backward compatibility.

[Fantomas42]

@bittner thanks for your explanation.

I would add this information, the organization the _base.html suffix with inheritance is designed to ease the declination of different templates for rendering the entries. Using a base intermediary template make also the maintenance task a lot easier.

This design organization has been done after my own experience on http://darwin.willbreak.it, which required a lot of customization to represent the different kind of entries. And it was a real pain before this change.

Regards

[jdejoode]

To be honest I think this issue is not solved yet. The question is: how can one change the way articles are presented in a 'list' view (for instance, 5 most recent articles in cmsplugin_zinnia) without affecting the way these individual articles are presented in their 'detail' view.

For instance: how can one have the entry-footer in the detail view, but not a list view.

Currently, one can change _entry_detail_base.html but that affects both list and detail views.

All help welcome

[Fantomas42]

If you change _entry_detail_base.html, it's affects by default the detail and list template used, because in zinnia/entry_detail_base.html and zinnia/entry_list.html, the same include in used.

{{ object.content_template }}

Change the include in zinnia/entry_detail_base.html to point to the same template each time.

Regards

[jdejoode]

That did the trick! It did take a lot of experimenting. In my view the name "detail" should be reserved for templates that are old school detail views. Thanks for the pointer.