A Web template system describes the software and methodologies used to produce web pages and for deployment on websites and delivery over the Internet. Such systems process web templates, using a template engine. It is a web publishing tool present in content management systems, software frameworks, HTML editors, and many other contexts.
A web template system is composed of:
The template and content resources are processed and combined by the template engine to mass-produce web documents. For purposes of this article, web documents include any of various output formats for transmission over the web via HTTP, or another internet protocol.
Various agencies and organizations use web template systems for mass-production of content when slower production alternatives prove unfeasible.
For an introductory overview, a news website is used as example. Suppose a "static website", where all web pages are static, and built by a web designer, that need to add and update pages every day.
A typical strategy to automate the web-designer's "repetitive work" is:
For the web designer, when each web page comes from a web template, he/she can think about a modular web page structured with components that can be modified independently of each other. These components may include a header, footer, global navigation bar (GNB), local navigation bar, and content well.
For programmers the template language offers a more restricted logic, only for presentation adaptations and decisions and not for doing complex (business model) algorithms.
For other members of the "site team", a template system frees webmasters to focus on technical maintenance, content suppliers to focus on content, and for all of them more reliability.
Moreover, it has the following advantages to its use:
There are many public software and commercial packages promoted as being web templates and template engines, but there are a high diversity of disperse kinds of solutions. To select and group them in a systematic way, the first step is to characterize them as template systems .
A second step is to group and identify main properties of each characterized system:
Web templates in this context produce only static web pages, and can be viewed as a ready-made web design, used to mass-produce "cookie-cutter" websites for rapid deployment.
HTML editors are the typical systems using outside server subsystems . They also commonly include themes in place of CSS styles. In general the template language is to be used only with the editor's software.
FrontPage and Dreamweaver are the most popular editors with template sub-system. A Flash web template uses Macromedia Flash to create visually appealing sites.
Many server-side template systems have the option to publish the output pages on the server, where the published pages will be static. It is a common feature on content management systems, like Vignette. But this does not have to be considered an out-server generation.
In the majority of the cases, this "publish option" not interferes with the template system , and it can be made by external software, as Wget.
Server-side dynamic pages began generated by templates with pre-existent software adaptated for this task. This early software was the preprocessors and macro languages, adapted for the web use, running on CGI. Next, a simple but relevant technology was the direct execution made on extension modules, started with SSI.
A lot of template systems are typically used as server-side template systems :
Technically, the methodology of embedding programming languages within HTML (or XML, etc.), used in many "server-side included script languages" are also templates. All of them are embedded complex languages.
There are also preprocessors used as server-side template engines. Examples:
Many web browsers support applying XSLT stylesheets to XML data in the browser itself, providing template functionality in the browser.
Other systems implement template functionality in-browser using JavaScript or other in-browser scripting language :
The more simple form are transclusions (HTML frames). In other cases it need Dynamic web pages to run.
Examples:
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