Tribiq CMS

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2.0 Overview

As in most content management systems (CMS), content is separated from presentational information. There are roughly 3 parts to the Tribiq CMS system:

  • the CMS software which holds things together - e.g. the PHP files
  • the content - e.g. data stored in a database
  • the templates - e.g. HTML and CSS files

There are some other customisable parts of the CMS, but to keep things simple for now, let’s concentrate on how content is rendered to the visitor using the templates.

The strength of a template-based architecture is that it enforces commonality of appearance throughout a website, with the possibility of instantaneous modification across the whole website, from one location.

Site Authors entering content don’t need to worry about the overall appearance of a web page, even how the content they’re entering will be formatted, since that presentational information is defined by the template.

In Tribiq CMS, we usually spell templates with a capital “T”, i.e. Templates. A Template is not a web page itself. It is a static file, and it contains no content (because that content is all in a database). A Template contains the layout of your page: XHTML, CSS, images and possibly JavaScript. It has special PHP “snippets” or “hooks” that pull content in from the CMS database.

Where a number of Templates have a similar styling or look & feel, they are grouped together. We call this a “Template Family”.

A typical Tribiq CMS website will have several Templates in one Template Family: for example, you may have one Template for your home page(s), one for text-heavy pages, one for News pages, and so on. They may have small differences between them, but they look like they belong together. This is typically what you ask a web designer to do - create a site-wide look and feel.

There are some common things for all Tribiq CMS Templates, and some things which are specific to your Templates. If you look inside your Tribiq CMS installation folder youwill see sub-folders as follows:

  • templatewrap
  • templates
  • templateincludes

In your web root directory there is a file called index.php. This performs the main control of the system (i.e. it checks that the visitor is allowed to see the page he is requesting and so on). It calls upon many CMS programs as it renders each page.

If all is OK and the page can be displayed to the user, a number of template-related files are called. index.php itself has nothing to say about the layout of your templates.

Table 1 shows in simple terms, how the principal template files are used, and what parts of a typical web page output they are create.

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