Page Themes

Conversant has a number of Page Types used to develop the website portion of a Conversation. These pages are created and edited through the "Structure" link in the Conversation's admin interface. These page types have been developed with flexibility in mind, which means in many cases a particular page type can be configured to serve a variety of purposes.

Because of the variety of configuration options, it is often beneficial to be able to save a set of page properties for use in another page of the same type, in the same conversation, or a different one. Page Themes are designed to serve that purpose. Simply put, a page theme is a snapshot of the properties of a particular page, which can be applied to another page of the same type.

Macrobyte will provide some "built-in" page themes, but you can also create and use an unlimited number of "user-defined" page themes as well.

Creating and Applying Page Themes

When editing the properties of a page in the "Structure" section of the Admin interface, a "Themes" tab is available on all pages based on Conversant's page types. This tab has form to allow you to create a user-defined theme based on the current settings of the page, and also a form to allow you select and apply a theme already defined in the conversation to the current page.

To save the page's configuration as a theme, go to the page in the structure editor, select the "Themes" tab, provide a name and description for the theme, and click the "Save theme" button.

To apply an existing theme to the page, select the theme from the popup menu, and click the "Apply theme" button. Applying a theme will overwrite the existing properties of the page, so be sure you intend to apply the theme before doing this. Scroll down on this page to see descriptions of the themes available.

Managing Page Themes

In the left hand column of the conversation admin area, a link "Page Themes" is available. Click on this link to manage themes in the conversation.

From here, you may delete existing themes, edit descriptions, and also import and export themes for use in other conversations, or to share with other Conversant users.

Importing a Page Theme :
To import a page theme, you must have a valid page theme file located somewhere on your hard drive. Click the "Browse" button to locate that file, type a name to assign the imported theme, and clicke the "Import theme" button. If the theme file is valid, it will be loaded into your conversation, and become available to be applied to pages of the appropriate type in the structure editor.

Saving and Deleting Page Themes :
Existing page themes are listed in this section. You may edit theme descriptions, if you do so, be sure to press the "Save changes" button to keep your edits. You may also click any number of checkboxes and click the "Delete Marked" button to delete themes from your conversation. Deleting a theme makes it unavailable for future use, but has no effect whatsoever on page who have already had the theme applied.

Exporting a Page Theme :
In the listing of existing themes, an "Export" link is available for each theme. This links to an XML version of the theme which may be saved to your disk and imported into other conversations. Note that when clicking on this link, many browsers will attempt to load the XML file into the browser window and display something that may look like garbage. If this occurs, hit your browser's back button, and right-click ( control-click on Mac ) the "Export" link and select the "Save link as..." option to save the file to your disk.