Template Blog

Next let's look at an example of Open Source software for Content Management. Mambo is an Open Source Content Management system that is used to create content driven sites like this template blog. Mambo is packaged with some really nice templates by default. The only problem with using the default templates is that they are being used by a lot of other people too. If you visit the Mambo site you will see that they advertise that there has been 2,000,000 downloads. Even if 1% of those people use the default templates that's 20,000 people using the same template.

Mambo templates are not as easy to customize because they use XML to place the template around your content. The easiest way to get your look and feel around your Mambo site is use another Mambo Gentle Gray Mambo Template. Mambo templates require you to edit a Cascading Style Sheet along with some HTML. The Mambo templates are going to be in their own folder. In that folder you will see a CSS folder, and Images folder, and 3 other files. The index.php is going to be the page you will be editing the HTML of the template or the layout file. The template_thumbnail.png image is the image used if you choose to use the "Template Chooser" feature of Mambo (this allows you to offer your visitors multiple templates for your site). It basically shows a thumnail of the template. Then you will see the templateDetails.xml. This page is the information used to dynamically generate your template. It contains the location of the images, the name of the template, a description of the template, and a bunch of other info.

First duplicate the Gentle Gray template folder, and rename it something you like. Now open the index.php page in your HTML editor and place you mouse above the gentel gray template, hit the enter button on your keyboard and you are ready to begin. Along with the index.php page you will also need to open the web template you want to use for your site. View the source of the web template you want to use and copy it, then paste it in that area you made above the Gentle Gray template on the index.php page. This way you can see your new template and the example template, so you will know where to place the snippets of code. These snippets will create such things like the left side navigation, top navigation and the right column features. It will also show you where to place the mainbody snippet for the content.