Using Page Templates

Click on Page Templates in the Control Panel to see a list of page templates. Page templates function similarly to site templates but at the page level. Each page template provides a pre-configured page to reuse. Within a page template, it’s possible to select a theme, a layout template, to add portlets to the page and to configure portlet preferences. Both sites and site templates can utilize page templates for creating new pages.

Figure 3.14: The Blog page template is already available for use along with the Content Display Page and Wiki page templates.

You can edit or delete existing page templates, configure their permissions, or add new page templates. By default, three sample page templates are provided:

• Blog: provides a page with three applications related to blogging. It has two columns, the main left column contains the blogs portlet and the small right column provides two side portlets, Tag Cloud and Recent Bloggers. The tag cloud application will show the tags used within the site and will allow navigating through the blog entries shown in the main blogs portlet.

• Content Display Page: provides a page preconfigured to display content. It has three auxiliary applications (Tags Navigation, Categories Navigation, and Search) and an Asset Publisher. The most significant aspect of this page is that the Asset Publisher is preconfigured to be display any web content associated with this page. This means that you can select any page created from this page template as a Display Page for a web content article. You can choose a display page for a web content article when creating a new web content article or when editing an existing one. When you create a new web content article, a unique (canonical) URL for the web content pointing to this page will be assigned to it.

• Wiki: provides a page with three applications related to authoring a wiki. It also has two columns, the main left column with the wiki application and two right side portlets to allow navigating through pages by tags and categories.

To add a new page template, click the Add button. Then enter a name and description for your template. Leave the Active button checked. Click Save and then identify your page template in the list. Click its name or use the Actions button to edit the page template. The Open Page Template link opens a new browser window which you can use to configure your new page. Any changes you make are automatically saved so you can close the new browser window once you’re done.

Note that after a new page template has been created the default permissions are to only allow the creator to use the page template. To give other users access to it, use the actions menu in the list of templates and choose Permissions. Once you see the matrix of roles and permissions, check the View permission for the role or roles needed to see the page template in the list of available page templates when creating a new page. If you want any user who can create a page to be able to use the page template, just check the View permission for the User role.

Figure 3.15: When creating a new site page, you're given options for the page template and page type.

To use your template to create a new page, just navigate to a page over which you have site administrator privileges and select Add → Page from the left menu. You’ll be able to select a page template and type a name for the new page. Alternatively, you can use the Site Administration page. First, make sure you’re on your desired site and navigate to Admin → Site Administration. Then click on Site Pages → Add Page, type a name, select your template from the drop down menu, and click Add Page to finish.

Figure 3.16: You can choose whether or not to automatically apply page template changes to live pages.

Note that by default, when a site administrator creates pages based on a page template, any future changes to the template are automatically propagated to those pages. Site administrators can disable this behavior by unchecking the Automatically apply changes done to the page template box. Occasionally, propagation for page templates fails due to unintended errors. To learn how to manage a failed page template propagation, visit the Propagating Changes from Site Templates to Sites section of this chapter.

If staging has been enabled, changes to the page template are automatically propagated to the staged page. These changes still need to be approved before the page is published to live. For this reason, the automatic propagation of page template changes to the staged page cannot be turned off and the Automatically apply changes done to the page template checkbox does not appear.

We’ll discuss staging in more detail later in this chapter. For now let’s look at importing and exporting templates.

Exporting and Importing Site Templates and Page Templates

If you want to export a site that uses site or page templates to a different environment (through a LAR file or remote publication), the templates must be exported and imported manually in advance or the import will fail.

To export a Site using a Site Template, use the following process:

1. Go to Control Panel → Site Templates and click Actions → Manage for the Site Template your site is using.
2. Click Export to obtain a LAR file with the content of the Site Template. Be sure to choose the applications and data you want exported.
3. In your target environment, go to Control Panel → Site Templates and create a new Site Template.
4. Click Actions → Manage Pages for that Site Template and then click Import.
5. Upload the LAR file containing your site template’s content.

Now the site can be exported and imported normally to this new environment.

For page templates, the process very similar:

1. Go to Control Panel → Page Templates.
2. Next to the page template you would like to export, click Actions → Export. This produces a LAR file you can import later.
3. On the target environment, go to Control Panel → Page Templates and create a new Page Template.
4. Next to the new template, click Actions → Import.
5. Upload the LAR file containing the exported page template from step 3.

The page template can now be imported normally to this new environment.

Next, let’s examine the tools Liferay provides for handling translations.