Templates, Section Pages and Content Pages

The ordinary section pages and content pages in a publication will normally have the same top-level structure: a set of areas representing the publication's overall graphical structure. A typical set of areas might be Top, Main, Right and Bottom:

Each of these areas may have an internal structure of groups and areas. The Main area of a section, for example, might have a Top Stories group and a Featured Stories group, each holding content items whose teasers are to be placed in the main area of the page.

Templates have exactly the same structure as the section pages in a publication, with the addition of a special area called Meta:

The Meta area has no internal structure and is used to hold "invisible" widgets. "Invisible" widgets affect how pages work in some way, but do not occupy any physical space on the page. The SEO widget, for example, lets you add search engine optimization data to the header of the rendered page, but does not change its appearance.

The other areas of a template will usually have an internal structure of groups and areas just like ordinary sections, but that structure will often be quite different from the structure of corresponding section pages. The Main area of a config.section.news template, for example, is likely to have a very different internal structure from the Main area of the news section page for which it provides layout.

The reason for this difference is that the purpose of the template and the section page are very different. The purpose of the section page is to allow an editor to create logical groupings of content items. An editor might, for example, put the most important items in a group called Top Stories, and other items that are to be featured on a page in a group called Featured Stories. The purpose of a template, however, is to define physical page layout, so the groups available for subdividing the main area are likely to reflect that, including information about size and display style in their names: Columns (720, 220), Tabs and so on.

There is, in other words, no direct correspondence between the groups in a section page and the groups in the templates that govern its layout. In order for a content item that has been dragged into an area on a section page to actually appear on the published page, it must be explicitly selected by one of the widgets placed on the template. For example, most of the widgets used for displaying content items in section templates have a Group name field that specifies the name of a section page group from which content items are to be selected. They may also have other properties for defining which specific content items are to be selected from that group. The trailer widget, for example, has a Number of trailers property that specifies how many content items you want to take from the top of the group.

The following picture shows how a trailer widget called Section trailers is used to display content items on the News section page of a publication. The Section trailers widget is placed as the second widget in the config.section template's Main area, and is configured to select the top four content items from a section page's main-1 group:

For more information about this, and about widgets in general, see Widgets.