23.13. Advanced website templates

| Chapter 23: Releasing |

| 23.13. Advanced website templates

The following describes how Inform uses the extras file and the two HTML pages in a template, and will only be needed if a new template has to make changes so radical that altering the CSS alone won't be enough.

The optional "(extras).txt" file - note brackets - is a text file which contains a list of named extras to throw in. For instance:

> easter.html
> egg.png

These named files need to be present in the template folder. Files with the extension ".html" go through the placeholder expansion process just like the index and source pages; all other files are copied verbatim.

HTML templates like "index.html" and "source.html" are fully valid HTML pages in their own right, though they have placeholder text where Inform will substitute the project's bibliographic data (see below). The "<head>" element should include a reference to "style.css", which of course will mean the CSS file given in the template (or the one from "Standard" if no CSS file is given) - for instance,

> <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" type="text/css" media="all" />

When it turns the template into the final web page, what Inform does is to replace certain capitalised words in square brackets with the appropriate text:

> [TITLE] becomes the story title
> [AUTHOR] becomes the author's name
> [YEAR] becomes the story creation year
> [BLURB] becomes the story description
> [RELEASE] becomes the release number
> [COVER] becomes an image of the cover art (the small 120x120 cover image)
> [DOWNLOAD] becomes the download link
> [AUXILIARY] becomes the list of feelie-like files, if any
> [IFID] becomes the IFID
> [STORYFILE] becomes the "leafname" of the story file, e.g., "Bronze.gblorb"
> [TEMPLATE] becomes the name of the template used to make the page
> [SMALLCOVER] becomes the filename of the small cover image
> [BIGCOVER] becomes the filename of the large cover image
> [TIMESTAMP] and [DATESTAMP] become the time and date of releasing

Everything else is left alone. In source pages, five further placeholders are available:

> [SOURCE] becomes the portion of the source text on this page
> [SOURCELINKS] becomes the navigational links
> [SOURCENOTES] becomes the footnote matter at the bottom of the source
> [PAGENUMBER] and [PAGEEXTENT] are such that the text "page [PAGENUMBER] of [PAGEEXTENT]" produces, e.g., "page 2 of 7"

Both [SOURCE] and [SOURCENOTES] must exist on the page, and [SOURCENOTES] must appear after [SOURCE] does in the file. (Of course the CSS in "style.css" might move the copy around on screen, but that's another matter.)

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