Big Medium's job is to make web maintenance easier for you by allowing you to focus on your site's content and message instead of its HTML. You give Big Medium the raw content for your site, and it handles the code for you, maintaining your site's look-and-feel while highlighting the latest articles and pages. But to do this, Big Medium has to know what your site looks like.

That's where templates come in.

Big Medium relies on special template files to maintain your site's distinctive design while keeping its content updated. If you choose to use one of Big Medium's pre-formatted skins, then these templates are installed and configured automatically. However, you also have the option to customize those pre-formatted templates, or to build your own templates from scratch.

And there's good news: Template files are not complicated. In fact, templates are little more than stripped-down HTML files that indicate how Big Medium should pour its dynamic content into your pages. More on that in a minute.

Before diving into how to build and edit templates, let's take a quick detour to understand how Big Medium sees and organizes your website.

Four Levels of Content

Big Medium manages sites with up to four levels of content, a familiar structure for most content sites:

Top level: The homepage. This is the front door of your site, the calling card that tells your site's visitors what your site does, what it has to offer and how it's all organized. Within this context, Big Medium updates the homepage every time you add content to your site, making sure that the homepage displays links to the most recent articles and news.

Second level: Main content sections. Main content sections are the key categories by which you organize the content of your site. Like sections of a newspaper, the main sections of a website create distinctions between types of content, helping your site's visitors quickly locate the content that is most interesting to them. Big Medium keeps the main links page (or index page) of each section up to date, showing your site's visitors an overview of links to the most recent articles from that section.

Third level: Content subsections. Many sites further subdivide their main sections into subsections. A news site with a sports section may choose to offer subsections highlighting the various sports: baseball, basketball, football, etc. While the main links page (or index page) for the sports section shows the most recent articles from all sports, the main links page for the baseball section displays only baseball articles.

Fourth level: Article pages. Article pages contain the actual content of your site.

Main Sections and Subsections

You may find that some of your sections don't require subsections, or that none of them do, and that's fine. Big Medium easily manages sites with main content sections only, and you can add subsections later if you need to.

A Template for Every Level

So what does all of this mean for building templates? To maintain all levels of your site, Big Medium needs at least four templates, one template for each of the four levels: homepage, main links page, subsection links page and article page. In practice, most sites may choose to have more templates than this, with separate main-section, subsection and article templates for every main section of the site. You may also create custom subsection and article templates for each content subsection.
The template types:

• Homepage (required). Every site has one homepage template.
• Main section template (required). Every main section of the site has its own main section template, which governs the appearance of the section's main links page (or index page).
• Default subsection index template (required). Every main section of the site has a default template for its subsection index pages, the pages that link to all articles within a subsection. Subsections with custom index templates (see below) use those custom templates instead of the default template.
• Default article template (required). Every main section of the site has a default article page template, which governs the appearance of the article pages in the section and all of its subsections. Subsections with custom article templates (see below) use those custom templates instead of the default template.
• Custom index template (optional). Subsections may have their own custom template for their main link pages. If you do not provide a custom index template for a subsection, the default subsection template is used instead.
• Custom article template (optional). Subsections may have their own custom template for their article pages. If you do not provide a custom index template for a subsection, the default subsection template is used instead.

Activating Your Templates with Big Medium Widgets

Big Medium templates are not difficult to create—they're little more than simplified HTML/XHTML pages. In fact, they are HTML pages, but with Big Medium's "widget tags" sprinkled throughout, replacing chunks of HTML that you may have been hand-coding until now.

Simply put, widget tags are placeholders that tell Big Medium where it should place HTML content within a page.

On an article page, for example, these widgets include the article headline, the article byline and the article text. So, in your article page template, you put the ++HEADLINE++ widget tag where you would like the headline to go; you put the ++CONTENTS++ widget tag where you would like the article text to show up; and you put the ++BYLINEDATE++ widget tag where you would like the article byline and publication date to appear.

As you probably deduced from the examples above, the format of the Big Medium widget is an uppercase word, with ++ on either side of it.

Each type of template has a different job to do, and so each one has a different set of widgets available to it. The homepage template has specialized widgets for displaying news links and the site's featured article, while article page templates have specialized widgets for displaying printer-friendly pages, bylines, related links and a bevy of article-specific content and tools.

For complete details on the available widgets and how to customize them for your site, check out the widgets help page.

Building Your Templates

The recommended way to create a Big Medium template is to start with a complete HTML/XHTML page. If you already have a live website, simply use the source code of existing pages for each of your templates. If you are designing a new website, create HTML mockups of how you would like each of your template page types to look.

Next, go through and identify the sections of HTML that you would like Big Medium to manage and update. Replace these HTML sections with Big Medium widget tags until all of the content you would like Big Medium to generate is represented by widget tags. That's all there is to it.

General Page Structure

As mentioned above, each type of template has its own specific set of widgets suited to the specific function of the page. However, there are several widgets that are available to all templates. The consistent use of these widgets across the site will help to guarantee clean HTML and a reliably familiar user experience for your visitors through the entire site. A complete list of widgets is available here with with full descriptions of what each widget does, but here are a few of the common widgets that you should use in all of your page templates.

• ++HTMLHEAD++ All of your Big Medium templates should include this widget. This widget generates the <!DOCTYPE> declaration and <html> and <head> tags, including a number of Big Medium housekeeping tags that help to display your pages properly. In addition, the widget contains meta tags to help search engines spider your site. ++HTMLHEAD++ should be the first line of all of your templates, followed immediately by the <body> tag.
• ++HTMLEND++ This widget marks the end of your template and should come as the last line of your template pages, immediately after the </body> tag, replacing the </html> tag.
• Main Section Navigation. Big Medium has several widgets that generate navigation bars for your site. The ++HNAV++ and ++VNAV++ widgets create horizontal and vertical text-link navigation of your main sections. The ++HNAVIMAGE++ and ++VNAVIMAGE++ widgets create horizontal and vertical graphic navigation of your main sections. Both types of navigation highlight the section of the site where the visitor is currently located, and also create rollover highlighting when the cursor moves over the section links.
• Subsection Navigation. Subsection navigation works the same way a main section navigation but with slightly different widgets. The ++HSUBNAV++ and ++VSUBNAV++ widgets create horizontal and vertical text-link navigation of the subsections. The ++HSUBNAVIMAGE++ and ++VSUBNAVIMAGE++ widgets create horizontal and vertical graphic navigation of the subsections. The subsections used in the widget are context-sensitive, so Big Medium displays only the subsections of the main section in which the your site visitors are currently located.
• ++ABOUTUS++. This widget generates your site's copyright information as well as any custom HTML/XHTML that you specify (for example, you might choose to link to your site's privacy policy, terms of use and "About us" section). Using this widget consistently across your site guarantees that the same copyright information and footer text is displayed on every page.

Starter Templates

Big Medium comes with a set of template files that you can use to get started in designing your own site templates. They are located in the "templates" directory that came with your Big Medium software.

Need more help?

For further assistance and documentation, visit the website of Global Moxie, the developer behind Big Medium.