The Ligature Online Manual
Jan 9, 2009

Header and Footer

Header/Footer templates are (X)HTML pages that contain the code for the start and end of the page. The content of all Ligature pages goes between the header and footer templates. As a sandwich analogy, the header and footer are the slices of bread and the page templates are the meats and lettuce and whatnot. The header and footer templates must be named header.htm and footer.htm respectively.

The default template included with Ligature looks like poo. Get creative!

header.htm

To use dynamic titles (titles that change depending on what page you're on), have

<title><?php echo "$pagetitle"."$tagline_is"; ?></title>

in the HEAD section. To use the information you specified in Preferences as a metatag, have

<meta name="author" content="<?php echo $author_is; ?>" />
<meta name="title" content="<?php echo $sitename_is; ?>" />
<meta name="description" content="<?php echo $sitedesc_is; ?>" />

somewhere in the HEAD section. If you want to use an external stylesheet (and you keep the stylesheet in the template/ folder) you must use

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="template/____.css" media="screen" />

note that the HREF requires you to say that your CSS file is in the template/ folder: simply href="screen.css" won't work because header.htm is called by files outside the template/ folder.

To allow browsers and aggregators to automatically discover your RSS feed, have the following code somewhere in the HEAD section.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS Blog Feed" href="rss.php" />

footer.htm

If you want a back-to-top link at the bottom of your pages, make an anchor named top in the BODY section of your header.htm file

<a name="top"></a>

and then add this somewhere in footer.htm:

<?php 
if(!$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] == "") {
    $thispage = $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'].'?'.$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];
} else {
    $thispage = $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];
}
echo '<a href="'.$thispage.'#top">Back to top</a>';
?>

footer.htm must must MUST have a link to the Ligature page; that's the only condition of use. By default, it's

Published by <a href="http://www.desiquintans.com/ligature">Ligature</a>

Back to top