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Realty Manager powered by Listings Manager
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What are templates and how do they work?

Templates are rather like blueprints. They contain the raw structure and appearance of a webpage, but lack the actual page data. They are used to create pages - and as such, they should never be referred to directly.

Each template contains three types of information:


1. HTML, which determines the page structure and appearance.
2. 'Template Cells': sections of page code used to output chunks of content, depending on the type.
3. 'Placeholders': special tags used to insert data from specific database fields. These enable you to uniquely pinpoint information already inputted into Realty Manager and place it in your page.

Realty Manager uses these templates to create the actual HTML web pages. For instance, when you create a new listing, Realty Manager feeds the listing information into a template, then creates an actual HTML document out of it and stores it on your server. The benefit to these templates is that page styles and structures only need to be set up once - afterwards, every page using the template will be produced to look alike. Additionally, since they are coded in HTML you can use any HTML/text/WYSIWYG editor (such as Dreamweaver, Frontpage or GoLive) to easily modify them.

Why does Realty Manager create static HTML pages, and not dynamically create them?

For one simple reason: speed. If every page on your site was created 'on the fly', your site would run a lot slower. Putting together dynamic pages requires your server to be actively involved - it has to put together each page again and again, and this uses up a lot of its resources. So instead, Realty Manager creates static HTML documents which can be retrieved quicker!

What templates are there?

Realty Manager comes with six default templates, each stored in the /templates/_realty/ directory. Here's an overview of what each one is used for.

_publish_homepage.html
This template is used to create a separate page for each user account set up in Realty Manager. This page, by default, contains all the information about that user and up to 10 different photos.

_publish_homepage_index.html
This is used to create an index of all user accounts in Realty Manager. The page displays a summary and link to the individual homepages and an optional picture.

_publish_listing.html
This template is used to create an individual html page for each listing created in Realty Manager. Each listing page can have up to 10 images as well as all the data for that particular listing.

_publish_listing_index.html
This template is used to create an index of all the user homepages. This page contains a summary of each listing, with a link to the full details page - created with the _publish_listing.html template.

_search_query.html
This is used to create your search page. It provides the search criteria available to your website visitor. You can fully customize this page to allow searching by whatever database field you want; even those fields that you yourself create!

_search_results.html
This template is used to display the results found by the search engine. By default, this template displays a brief description of each listing, with an optional image and a link to the full listing page. However, like all the templates, you have control over what information is presented in the page.

Also, take a look at our online documentation on the templates. This is a handy reference page, containing information on both the templates themselves and the placeholders and template cells available within those pages

Did this "How to" make sense? Send us your feedback, or let us know if you're using something like this on your installation of Realty Manager and we'll link to it as an example.