An Act-enabled conference web site uses two subdirectories:
contains templates and other files used by the framework.
contains all the files that will be statically served (i.e. sent to the client without any processing: files, CSS, etc.)
You organise wwwdocs as you please. To link to files stored in
your wwwdocs directory, use [% make_uri("path/to/file").
The actdocs directory is laid out as follows:
Configuration files for the conference: they contain information sur as begin and end date, room names, tools enabled (online payment, pre-registration, etc), languages enabled, etc.
The files are: act.ini and local.ini.
what we call "static" pages: multilingual templates for all the pages that are not generated by Act handlers (typically, the good old index.html)
You should only put .html files in this directory. Images, stylesheets and other files stored here will not be found by the framework. You must put those in wwwdocs.
your own version of the Act templates (you won't need to do this), and all the other templates you'll need for the conference
In fact, you can already start to create some files for your Act website, you'll only need the static and templates subdirectories.
Links to the so-called "static" pages are created with the macro
[% make_uri('news.html') %]
The parameter being the file path relative to actdocs/static.
Please note that at least one template is required: actdocs/templates/ui. This file contains a TT2 wrapper that will be used by the framework to create full pages from the bits of HTML it generates.
That means you have total control of the UI, the so-called "static" pages. What Act gives you is all the pages it can generate: users, talks, payment, schedule, etc. We have some ideas for future enhancements, but shhh.
One of the big features is that the templates are multilingual. Here an example of what you can do:
<html>
<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/myconf/css/style.css" />
<title>[% title %]</title>
</head>
<body>
[% content %]
</body>
</html>
[% title = {
fr => 'Ma conférence'
en => 'My conference'
de => 'Mein Konferenz'
pt => '...'
};
WRAPPER ui title = title.${global.request.language}
%]
<t>
<en>Welcome!</en>
<fr>Bienvenue !</fr>
<de>Willkommen!</de>
<pt>...</pt>
</t>
It is not possible to put <t>...</t> tags within TT2 [% ... %] blocs.
But it is rarely needed.
Act manages the language of the generated pages according to the user's choice, but it will only produce pages in the languages configured in the conference. If you decide that your site must be in en/pt, even if Act know how to display pages in other languages, no language other than the official languages for the conference will be displayed.
Act provides menu templates for all the categories provided by the framework. You can therefore create your own menus very easily (e.g. in a file named templates/menu that can be PROCESSed in your templates/ui template):
<!-- user info, login, language -->
[% PROCESS menus/user %]
<!-- users list, search, stats -->
[% PROCESS menus/users %]
<!-- wiki -->
[% PROCESS menus/wiki %]
<!-- talk lists, submission and schedule -->
[% PROCESS menus/talks %]
<!-- event management in the schedule -->
[% PROCESS menus/events %]
<!-- payment menu (for the treasurer) -->
[% PROCESS menus/treasurer %]
<!-- administrative pages -->
[% PROCESS menus/admin %]
<!-- other current Act conferences -->
[% PROCESS menus/act_confs %]
If you want to integrate those menus in you UI, you'll only have to redefine the following templates in the actdocs/templates directory (because the submenus use the menus/item and menus/section templates). For example:
<li>[% content %]</li>
<li class="parent">[% content %]</li>
The various menus and links are activated and shown according to each user's rights and the conference current configuration.