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Tutorial Sections
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- Styles vs Templates - What's the Difference?
- Installing and Using a Custom Style
- Understanding Templates and Adapting an Existing Site to use a custom template
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The Style and Template features available in NetObjects Fusion can cause some confusion. For what it's worth, both terms are used by other applications in a somewhat similar context.
In Microsoft Word or Corel WordPerfect, for instance:
- A Style is a set of pre-defined formatting that you can apply to some text.
- A Template is a complete starting point for a new document that can contain macros, formatting styles, and boilerplate content (such as a logo graphic and the various address and signature blocks on a letter).
Within Fusion, there is even some confusion between Site Styles and Custom Text Styles and Photo Gallery Styles. Those are topics beyond the scope of this tutorial, but they are covered well by other gotFusion tutorials (see the links at the end).
- You can get custom-made Styles and Templates from the gotFusion or FusionBuilders Stores (and other sources).
- The key to understanding what to do with a custom Style or Template lies in knowing what Fusion Styles and Templates do.
What's the difference?
To best understand the difference between a style and a template in Fusion-talk, you need to know what each does in Fusion.
What's a NOF Style?
In a nutshell, anything you can set in Fusion's Style View is part of the style. All Styles have:
- A collection of graphics for Banner, NavBar Buttons, etc.
- A collection of text formatting definitions for standard HTML tags like <p>, <H1>, <ul>, etc.
Setting a different Site Style affects all pages in your site. A Site Style only affects the parts of the page that it can affect:
- Graphics, which are set in Style View, Graphic tab: your Banner, Primary and Secondary NavBar Buttons, Data List Icons, Background, and Site Style Line
- Text, which is set in Style View, Text Tab: Standard HTML tags, Body, Normal (P), Text Object, Text NavBar, Link, Unordered List, Ordered List, and Headings <H1> to <H6>
What's in a Fusion Style?
Let's open up a Style folder in Windows Explorer and have a look. We have:
- A file named display.css: This is A CSS definition file containing formatting commands that you see in style view
- A file named Index.html: This is an HTML file that renders the style's settings in Style View
- A file named Style.css: This is a CSS definition file that contains the settings from Style View, Text Tab.
- A file called Style.ssx: This is a proprietary NOF-generated file: do not attempt to edit it by hand. This file stores all the settings you can change in Style View!
- A folder named Images: This contains all the graphics you see in Style View, Graphics Tab. It may also contain other images that are not used in the style, or files with an extension of .BAK. (It is safe to delete the .BAK files if you no longer need these images.)
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