Advanced Theme Creation Notes

After reading the theme creation notes there may be some more things you wish to do, things that are outside the scope of most themes.

This page suggests some interesting things you can do to make your work simpler, and the user experience more fun.

File Inclusion

Within the template files themselves you may include other files, such as images and stylesheets - this is all standard HTML.

In addition to this, though, you can include snippets of HTML from other files, which may be handy for creating menus, etc.

The process by which this works is very simple; and very similar to how Server Side Includes work with the Apache Webserver.

To include a file 'menu.html' from within your template directory insert the following code into your file:

<!-- include="menu.html" -->

The file will be read an inserted into your output. (Note that the inserted files may have any extension, and will be read from the template directory if they're not fully qualified).

Including Program Output

In a similar way to includings you can include the output of commands within your HTML files.

This could be used for displaying the server load, or displaying a random quotation with the Unix fortune program.

Usage is as follows:

<!-- exec="/bin/cmd argumetns .." -->

Other things?

If you can think of other things which you would like to see let me know and I'll think of adding them.