# Gossamer Links Help

Table of Contents

Template Help

Gossamer Links is powered entirely by templates. Any part of the output you want to change can easily be altered by editing one of the templates.

Template Sets:
You can have as many template sets as you need. You can use multiple template sets to provide multi-language versions of your directory, or to brand your directory in a different look.

If you are using Dynamic pages, you can view your templates by simply going to page.cgi?t=luna where luna is the name of the template set you want to use. So you could create a link page.cgi?t=english and page.cgi?t=french to provide two different language versions for your visitors.

You can set what template is used by default, and when building html pages in Setup-> Build Options.

Template Structure:
Gossamer Links template sets are laid out as follows:

    admin/templates/
                    luna/
                            local/
                            compiled/
                    ..

luna is called the template set, and inside the template set directory are the original templates that ship with Gossamer Links. If you wish to make changes to a template manually (using FTP, or the included FileMan), you must save your altered template inside the local directory. The way it works is that Gossamer Links will look for your template first in the local directory, then inside the main template set directory. So if you only change the header and footer, all you do is save include_header.html and include_footer.html inside the local directory.
When you upgrade, Gossamer Links will overwrite all files in the luna directory, so you must put your changes inside local. If you use the template editor included in Gossamer Links, it will do this for you.
The compiled directory is where Gossamer Links converts your template to code for faster execution. You should not need to touch any files in this folder.

Templates:
Gossamer Links has quite a few templates. You can think of each "screen" being equal to one template. So when a user clicks on add and sees an add form, that screen is represented by one template (conveniently named add.html). Similarly, the search results are represented by a template search_results.html. this file by hand, but rather use the admin interface. A complete list of the templates used in Gossamer Links can be found under "Templates" in the "Customizing Gossamer Links" section of the manual.

For help on editing templates, be sure to read our Template Syntax section. For tags you can use on the templates, be sure to read the Template Tags section. For in-depth information about the template system, see the Template Documentation.

Table of Contents