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Templates

Templates are the core mechanism allowing you to personalize the appearance and behavior of your website. Understanding templates is vital to making the most of Backlight.

Templates​

In Backlight's admin, go to Designer => Templates. The Templates menu allows you to create and manage templates for your albums, album sets and pages.

The following submenu commands are available under the Templates menu:

List Templates​

Displays a list of existing templates, or allows you to create new templates.

Import Template​

Allows you to import templates previously exported as files.

Assign Templates​

Here you can assign templates to be used by Backlight's “special” pages, such as search results, cart checkout pages, etc.

Uploaded Images​

Allows you to upload images to Backlight, or manage images previously uploaded. You may upload a logo, favicon, apple-touch-icon, or images you'd like to use on your pages. Uploaded images will be available to select in various places when designing Backlight's templates.

Clear Template Cache​

A maintenance function, this resets Backlight's template cache and causes templates to be rebuilt.

Template Types​

Backlight handles three types of templates:

  • Page Templates
  • Album Set Templates
  • Album Templates

A Page Template defines the overall look and feel of the website. Here, you set up your masthead, logo, site navigation, and the basic layout and behavior for the whole of your website. A page template forms the foundation of every page on your site, including album set and album templates.

Album Set Templates and Album Templates allow you to customize the presentation of your thumbnail grids and image presentations. When creating a new album set template or album template, you must select an existing page template on which to base your design. Therefore:

Page Template + Album Set Template = Album Set

Page Template + Album Template = Album

When creating a new page, album or album set, you will be asked to choose an existing template to use for that creation. You absolutely do not need to create separate templates for each page, album, etc. In fact, it's entirely possible to create an entire site using only one template in each category of Page Template, Album Template, and Album Set Template.

Any modifications made to an existing template will propagate to all pages using that template, making it very easy to adjust your site design.

In general, you want to create as few templates as possible, as you will have fewer items to manage when making changes to your site.