neat way to make multi-page templates

Hey,

A website I’m making right now has quite a few different page layouts (blog, home, portfolio etc are all different).
Now, should I make a new template for each file, or is there a way to use one template, but set some parts of the design in the page itself, without cluttering the editor?

I hope you understand my problem!

Kind regards

Look into Template Variables.

I start off with one template that is all html. Then I go back and cut out the sections that lend themselves to "blocks" of content. Navigation, header, footer, sidebar etc... Take that section of content is static, then paste it into a chunk. If it is dynamic content, replace it with a snippet or a template variable.

Thanks for the reactions,

What I would really like to do, is being able to set the layout per page, without using snippets in the editor,
or have different templates for every page.

Ah well, I guess that’s just impossible.

Thanks guys!

Some people are developing this exact functionality...take a look at

http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,33985.0.html

You can have blocks of layout code be controlled by checkbox TV (see the wiki post: http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Create_TV-Based_Chunks or read the blog post: http://modxdeveloper.com/blog/check-box-tv-toggle-display for some examples) this way it is one template but you can change the layout for each page.

I try to keep snippets out of the editor it just confuses the clients. I was referring to your template. You can use TV’s to choose a chunk. With keeping most of the parts as chunks multiple templates are not that difficult to maintain. You might want to consider using different css links to manipulate the layout.

That helped!

thanks guys!

The idea of templates is that if the page is doing something else, you use a different template. To have 7 different templates for one site is not extreme, it can easily make sense. Also, this way you don’t have to explain how each different template variable would need to be set depending on which page the client is using.

I’ve got a tutorial on using TVs for managing content blocks here http://www.sottwell.com/how-template-variables-work.html