A very good question to ask, if you want to know how CaCMS works, is to ask how the index.html file is generated...
About index.html
First a short introduction about index.html usage in CaCMS:
index.html is a regular HTML file and contains the webpage which is show in your browser. An example is the page you are looking at now. This HTML file does not really exist, but is dynamically generated by CaCMS whenever you request a different page.
The browser renders that HTML into a colorful webpage. If you want to know what is really stored in index.html look at the source of this page (this can be done in all browsers, e.g. in Firefox go to the View menu and then to Page Source).
Overview and Terms
To understand how the layout process works, we first introduce a few terms: HTML element:
An HTML element is what you already know from HTML, spans, divs, paragraphs, links, images, ...
In the picture on the right, HTML elements may be found between the components. Component:
A component is a piece of functionality of CaCMS that produces HTML elements. For example a news component could produce HTML paragraphs (p) and text. More information about components can be found on the
Components page. Template:
A template may contain components, other HTML elements. and a single link to another template.
An example template may look like this:
Container:
A container glues templates together. It is no real object, its only a
grouping of templates. To highlight that again, a container does not directly
contain any HTML elements or CaCMS components, only templates.
Now even though it is no real object, its very important, because whenever
somebody looks at a website generated by CaCMS, containers are requested and
the containers are then rendered to pages which are shown to the visitor.
Layout:
With layout we mean the complete set of templates assigned to a container.
A Possible Layout
Generation process
The process which is executed by CaCMS to generate index.html tells you a lot about how CaCMS works. Therefore we will spend some time in looking at that. Please follow the links to read about the generation process for
Visitors or
Editors.
Related Tables and Components
The tables used to associate containers with templates are shown below.
Templates may be edited with the Template Editor component. To assign templates to a container, use the Template Selector component.