Chapter 3: The SiteTemplate Editor

In addition to being able to edit XT templates directly using any text editor and a browser, or an HTML design tool such as Dreamweaver, you can also edit them directly in Sitellite using the SiteTemplate app. You'll find SiteTemplate under the Control Panel > Tools menu.

Permissions

In order for SiteTemplate to be able to modify your templates, make sure you have your folder permissions set correctly. This is usually done in the Sitellite installation process, but some site administrators skip certain permissions or change them afterwards.

The "inc/html" folder and sub-folders need to have their permissions set to allow the web server to write to them, usually 0777.

The benefits of using SiteTemplate instead of an external editor lie mainly in its integration with standards verification services. SiteTemplate has the ability to validate your XML and will require valid XML before it will save your changes, so you never break your site with a template change. SiteTemplate also validates against the following standards at the click of a button:

• XHTML compliance
• CSS compliance
• Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) compliance
• Section 508 Accessibility compliance

The first screen of SiteTemplate is straightforward. You see the list of available template sets, and you have a link to create an new template set.

If you click on a template name, it opens the template editor. This is a standard text editor, similar to Xed editor used elsewhere in Sitellite, but including special functions to help you building your templates.