It has been very quiet on this site, and that usually means that I am working on something. And indeed, I am working on the new site for Fimcap.
Besides that, the temperature in Lleida, almost reaching 40 °, makes that I don’t want to spend too much time behind the PC, but rather stay in the water of the swimming pool. As you might be worried what is going on here, I deceided to write a little bit about the new fimcap site.
We decided to implement the new site using the eZ Publish CMS, which allows for multi-lingual content and custom defined content types. This flexibility of course has a price: a steep learning curve. The basics are quite simple, but problems start when you want to modify templates. You literally can control everything, but you have to find the right template. Each page is made up from dozens of little templates, each of which can reside in several places.
Let me explain that in more detail. If you do a fresh installation, your site is configured to use two sets of templates: standard, which contains some bare-bones unstyled templates that make sure eZ Publish outputs at least something, and base, which adds a little bit of style. Of course, for your own site you want to use your own design, and you can either replace the base design, or add your own design, which is what we did. Now every time a template is called, eZ Publish first looks in the Fimcap design. If it can’t find a template, it will search in the base design, and finally it will fall back to the standard design. So if I want to modify a template, I have to search in that order as well to find the currently used template. After a working for some weeks with the template system, I finally got the hang of it, and am able to find the correct templates quickly…
In case you’re interested in the progress we’re making, have a look at new.fimcap.org.
