This document covers features, statements and their syntax supported by CoTemplate v.2.7 and later.

Blocks

Blocks are the largest elements in the template's structure. Templates consist of blocks, blocks consist of other blocks, statements, tags and raw text. Here is the block syntax:

<!-- BEGIN: BLOCK_NAME -->
Block HTML contents here
<!-- END: BLOCK_NAME -->

Most templates have one root-level block named MAIN, but multiple root-level blocks in one template file are allowed. HTML...

Since Cotonti 0.9.1 a new set of debugging facilities is available to template designers.

The first one is block/tags listing mode. It outputs a plain tree of blocks and assigned tags in them for the current page. Example:

To get such a debug page, you need to make sure debug_mode is enabled for your Cotonti instance first. Open datas/config.php and make sure you have debug_mode enabled:

$cfg['debug_mode'] = TRUE;

Then you can see a TPL dump of any page by simply appending tpl_debug=1...

What is CoTemplate?

CoTemplate is a template engine allows you to store HTML code separately from your PHP code (as opposed to many other template engines, like Samrty do). CoTemplate based on XTemplate class — a fast and lightweight block template engine, but extends it with many useful features such as nested blocks, various kinds of variable interpolation, callbacks, etc. and still is very short and very optimized.

Cotonti and CoTemplate

CoTemplate is using blocks for outputting HTML code....

Those familiar with building or modifying Cotonti templates will have seen and used template tags. Tags are short bits of code which, when parsed by XTemplate, are replaced by a block of HTML code. This ensures your template file exists only of HTML code. Any PHP generated code is handled by the plugin and parsed using a tag.

When developing a plugin, it’s important to know how to define tags and conditional blocks with the XTemplate system. Before, most plugins used the legacy way of getting...

Including content in the pages or the skin files

Including a TPL file into another TPL file

You can include another .tpl file in the theme files using this code:
 

{FILE "themes/YOUR_THEME/myfile.tpl"}

Simple example: Ask visitor to sign-up for your newsletter

We're gonna create reminder.tpl and put it in themes/mytheme folder.

This is the code:
 

<div class="block">
<img src="theme/{PHP.theme}/img/newsletter.png" width="64" height="64" alt="" /> 
Please, don't forget to s...