Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery - Ebook-Cours.com

We might want to flag a node as unpublished using the element with class
submitted. If we have taxonomy terms, we can put them in the element with the
taxonomy class. Similarly, content and links go inside of the div tags with the
appropriate class names.
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Chapter 6
It looks like we have the information we need. Let's make this pure HTML fragment
our template.
Following a naming convention similar to the PHP Template names, let's store the
previous code inside of our theme with the name node.tpl.html. Notice that the
last part of this filename is .html, not .php. We don't want this file to be executed on
the server side (it would be a waste of time and would make this template look like a
PHP Template).
From a template to a system: what next?
We have now devised a template language that fills some requirements. It should be
easy for any experienced HTML author to create templates in our system. After all,
they're just HTML fragments. Of course, we would want to make sure they used the
correct CSS classes, but no new language will need to be learned.
We have also stored our template in its own file. That should make it easier to
edit as well.
But wait. What do we do with these templates? How can we use them from
JavaScript? After all, the templates are on the server, and unless the browser
requests them, they will not be sent to the client.
Furthermore, templates on the server side are composed into a single HTML
document before they are transmitted to the client. However, a client-side template
is obviously not going to work that way. The JavaScript template engine won't even
have started until a pre-built document has been sent.
What we need is a way to get the template from JavaScript, use that template for
theming, and then inject the results into the existing document (the one built on the
server). This might initially seem like a tall order, but we are going to borrow a little
technology from the next chapter and create an engine that will do just what I
have described.
The strategy used here could be generalized with a little bit more code to
provide template services to any Drupal JavaScript application. However,
to keep our code concise, we will create a specific application to meet
our needs.
This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Richard Ostheimer on 18th June 2009
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