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Templates and containers
Solution or problem?

Templates are to some extent inevitable when creating layouts for web-pages and emails, but I’ve never been their biggest fan.

I think it goes back a couple of decades when templates were heralded as the clever way to publish stuff online. A CGI script or similar would grab some text and image tags, open the template and swap tags for content, rather like a ‘mail merge’ function used to personalise letters. The problem for me was/is that they’re so rigid. The content is forced to fit the template rather than the other way round.

I’ve always tried to keep things flexible. The layout of pages in Typomania CMS can vary from page to page, and each component can be customised. The problem with this approach is that the steps required to adjust the layout of a page needs to be repeated to create the same layout again.

Template modules

Unless I’ve changed things radically, there should be an example of a template module further down this page. Links to recent pages should appear thanks to a modular template… more later.