Developer Area/Core Subsystems/Page Title Template

All templating in Mahara is done with Dwoo (File:Http.pnghttp://dwoo.org/). Each page that requires templating (which should be all pages that return HTML) will do so by fetching a smarty object via the File:Http.pngsmarty() function (in lib/web.php).

Usually, the smarty() function is called to generate an entire html page, and smarty_core() to generate a fragment. When you have a page that needs to include forms built with pieform() (see Developer_Area/Core_Subsystems/Form_API_(Pieforms)), you should try to build all the forms before calling smarty(). Failure to do this can result in some javascript required by form elements not being included.

Template Locations

The smarty object returned searches for templates in /theme//templates/ where starts at the current theme, and walks up parents until it finds a file (or a theme with no parent and no file causing an error).

Templates for artefacts in Mahara are accessed via a separate resource plugin. Where normal plugins are accessed just with a relative path (e.g. "mycontacts/index.tpl") artefact plugins will use their plugin name in the path (e.g. "arteface:internal:profile/index.tpl"). The template files themselves should be placed in /artefact//theme//

Also, templates for the render() method of an artefact should be placed in the 'render' subdirectory of the artefact plugin's template directory, and should follow the naming convention _.tpl

e.g., /artefact/blog/theme/default/render/blog_listchildren.tpl

Template variables

The following variables are set by the smarty() function for every page and template.

• THEMEURL: The base url for static content
• WWWROOT: The base url for the mahara system
• USER: The user object
• JAVASCRIPT: A list of javascript files to include in the header. This list is passed into this function (see below).
• HEADERS: An array of any further headers to set. Each header is just straight HTML (see below).
• PUBLIC: Set true if this page is a public page
• MAINNAV: Array defining the main navigation

Template functions

The following functions are available for every page and template.

str

str is a custom function that looks up tags and returns an internationalised string.

Attribute Name	Type	Required	Default	Description
tag	String	Yes	n/a	The tag to look up.
section	String	No	mahara	Section to look up the tag in.
assign	String	No	empty	If specified, rather than putting the string inline, will put it in this variable.