Active Template

We have been fairly busy and have not had the time nor the personal need to upgrade this project to D6. If you are interested in becoming a co-maintainer, please contact us at http://collectivecolors.com

The Active Template module is similar to the ConTemplate module except that it works with Views instead of content types. Essentially it gives you the power to customize your views displays in any way that you can imagine. The Active Template module allows you to:

1.) Easily integrate JavaScript/jQuery into your view for animation and/or increased interactivity.

2.) Define custom CSS that acts on your view.

3.) Define multiple templates for each view and reference them independently.

4.) Have the most innovative and feature rich views in the universe!

The Active Template module was originally built for use in an art gallery site (DeVorzon gallery) and started out as "Taxonomy Template." However, we realized that views is MUCH more useful in terms of generating custom queries as well as block displays, so we rebuilt Taxonomy Template such that it used views instead of taxonomy.

Active Template requires knowledge of Views, PHP, and (for best results) JavaScript/jQuery and CSS to use. It is a developer's module.

Q. What is the problem and how does Active Template fix it?

A. The problem with views alone is it really just provides a list of items. Each item in this list is, in terms of display and content settings, exactly the same as every other item in the list. This is BORING! Active Template fixes this by allowing you to HIGHLY modify how your views are displayed. Say you are tired of the same old boring lists that views outputs. You want your view to output one node teaser and 10 node titles. You want the titles clickable and once clicked, you want the displayed teaser to show the teaser that corresponds to the clicked title. This is very possible with Active Templates.

Working with Active Template is fairly easy once you understand the core concepts. As was mentioned before Active Template is similar in nature to ConTemplate however instead of working with 1 node you are working with (n) nodes, where n is the number of nodes your view outputs. A very simplified Active Template may be defined as follows:

foreach($nodes as $node) {
  // Do stuff 
  // Add (nodes/parts of nodes) to output
  // Do yet more stuff
}
print $output;

Your Active Templates can be as dynamic and rich as you can imagine. You can make them really stand out with the addition of JavaScript/jQuery or you can just tack on a few little things here and there to give them a little boost of functionality. The limit of what is possible is defined only by your imagination.