Web Oriented Object Framework

User Guide (Version 0.5b4)

Woof!
User Guide (Version 0.5b4)

Table of Contents
Extending the default layout Page sections

Custom page layout

As stated earlier, for the most part a layout file is really no different from any other template file making up the content. It is only by convention that layout files are focused on aspects related to the different logical sections in a page and expect to retrieve the actual content for the sections from other templates. It is recommended that you follow the same convention with your own custom layouts.

A layout template should generate a complete HTML document including the document header. It is useful to also include in it common elements that are shared across all web pages, such as style sheets, javascript link and so on.

Below is a minimal layout.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
  <title>A static layout</title>
</head>
<body>
  <p>This layout is a static page.</p>
</body>

This layout is purely static and self-contained. The only time this might be useful is for a specific controller action that has no dynamic content, like a generic error.

The following layout uses the page section mechanism like the default layout but instead of using the standard page section names header, main etc., it uses page section names that are dynamically defined by the controller and arranges these one below the other.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
  <title>A layout with dynamically named pages sections</title>
</head>
<body>
% my variable page_section_names
% foreach ps_name $page_section_names {
%    page fetch $ps_name content
     $content
% }
</body>

The above layout allows the controller to define the names of the page sections and their order.

Finally, you can even define a layout that completely ignores the page section definition mechanisms in Woof! and locates content by some other means.

Extending the default layout Page sections