If you havent done so already, be sure to checkout the how-to guides: Developer how to guides

Kademi uses a templating system which allows you to completely change the behaviour of any page in your website, and to create new templates with dynamic capabilities.

For example, you can create a template that renders a product, and use custom fields to store structured content. The template could dynamically display orders of the product by the current customer and related products, etc.

Template code is executed using Apache Velocity template engine.

Template structure

Kademi uses a three level structure of content and templates:

  • The page itself, ie a html page or an app provided resource. Example of this page - make sure you view source!
  • The page template, which controls the content layout for a specific type of content or resource
  • The theme template, which controls the layout common to all pages such as menu, footer, etc
An example:

By default any html page will be rendered in a template. If no template is specified the default page template will be used.

To prevent templating insert a DOCTYPE declaration at the top of the html:

		<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
		<html xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
		<head> ...

To specify a template (either for a page or for a page template) use a link element like this:

		<link rel="template" href="/ref/guides/theme/howtoPage" />

 

Template Rendering

When a page is rendered by the templating system, the system first locates its page template and theme template. It collects header elements (eg js and css files) into a single list, and css references are merged to allow LESS compilation and then executes the body templates.

The theme template is executed first. The content in its body tag is used as a template and the content tag is used to output content inside the template:

		#content

The content tag passes execution to the page template, which also has its body executed as a template. For application provided resources (eg dashboard and profile pages) there is no underlying html page, and the page template is executed using objects in context such as the current user. For HTML pages, the page template uses the body and title from the html file to output the actual content of the page:

		<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
		<head>
		<title></title>
		<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/theme/javadoc.css" title="Style" />
		</head>
		<body>
		<div class="container">
		<h1>$page.title</h1>
		<div class="content">
		$!body
		</div> 
		</div>      
		</body>
		</html>

 

Template Variables

Several variables are placed in the rendering context for use by templates

Name Type Description
request Request The request object, which allows access to request variables, cookies, etc
page Depends on the resource being accessed This represents the current resource being accessed. Eg a BlogArticleFolder, a ProfilePage, DashboardPage, etc
rootFolder WebsiteRootFolder, or OrganisationFolder for admin pages The root resource for the current host/domain
folder   The parent resource of the currently accessed resource
params Map Request parameters, as a map of keys and values
user UserResource The current user, expressed as a resource
profile ExtProfileBean The current user, expressed as a light weight object
userResource UserResource (alias for user)  
applicationManager ApplicationManager  
applications Applications  
menu MenuItem The root menu item for this site
formatter Formatter Lots of useful methods for formatting and parsing data
     

 

Find out about using Kademi forms:
Programming with Kademi Forms
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