Learning: Design Structure

A typical design will contain the following subdirectories

/fonts

This contains any font files that are used by the “texttoimage” template operator so that you can automatically generate images for navigation. As a rule of thumb, text based navigation is a better way to design a site for numerous reasons, flexibility, speed of download, search engine friendliness…etc. But if your client insists on graphic based navigation the “texttoimage” template operator is very handy

/images

This is for non content images, ie. any images that make up the look and feel of the site but aren’t a part of the content of the site and aren’t entered via the administration interface. For example, a background image used across the top of the page would be stored in the images folder

/overrides

This is where you store templates that are triggered by the override rules. Eg. if you wanted to have a news template that has an extra attribute such as “publication” you would create an override template called news.tpl and store it in the /overrides directory. Usually you would copy the standard template used and then alter it rather than writing your own template from scratch

/stylesheets

All stylesheets go in this folder, it’s pretty straight forward. How exactly you structure your css is up to you but for some advice, check the Implementation chapter for one way to efficiently manage css files.

/templates

The main templates and custom templates go here. For many sites, you’ll find a custom pagelayout.tpl in this folder.