Default Templates Explained

DSCMS was installed with numerous default templates (you choose this during the installation process). These are to display some of the features of DSCMS and to give you a head start when creating your own web sites.

The tags that are unique to templates in DSCMS are described on the page DSCMS tags in the templates (see the sidebar menu to the right). Click on any link beneath that page in the menu to the left to see what the default templates look like.

Changing the style of Default Templates

All of the templates and style sheets have comments throughout them to help you find where to change the look of them.

Menus/navigation

Two kinds of navigation are used in these templates. For each there is a menu template in the Menu Manager. CSSMenu is a dropdown menu using only CSS. Well, for Internet Explorer 6 some JavaScript has to be used... Two of the page templates are using CSSMenu for navigation, one with the menu horizontally at the top and the other with the menu vertically to the left.

The other navigation type is what we call Simple Navigation. That is just an unordered list that gets its style and appearance from the style sheets (CSS). Also here one page template is using a horizontal simple navigation and the other a vertical menu.

The menu tag in each template is used like this: {menu template='cssmenu.tpl'}, where the cssmenu.tpl is the name of the Menu Manager template, if you make a custom menu template you don't need to use the .tpl on the end. More parameters can be used, for example to start a menu from the second level, collapse the children pages until the parent is clicked etc. Read more about that in the Menu Manager Help in the Admin Panel.