About Templates

Want to change the way your Locator looks?  Then all you need to do is edit your html templates to your own taste.

Templates

The 'Front-End' (the public area that is accessible by your website visitors) is controlled by customizable templates.  Each template is coded in standard HTML and JavaScript.   So, editing the look and feel of your locator system is fairly easy.  If you know how to edit html and add your own graphics, then changing the way your locator looks is a snap.

Placeholders

To understand how our templates work, then you should be aware of code snippets that are placed throughout your templates, called Placeholders.  These Placeholders are used to determine where the program will output the results into the templates, before the final results are sent to the user's browser.

Our Placeholders look something like this:  {##} or {name} and are placed in the html code of a template.

Mandatory Placeholders:

Never remove a mandatory placeholders.  If you see a placeholder that looks like {##}, then you need to leave that placeholder in your html code at all times.  Even moving mandatory placeholders to a new location on the template can cause undesired results.  The program uses these types of placeholders to determine the section of a template.  If mandatory placeholders are removed from your templates then your system may produce unwanted results.

Optional Placeholders:

Optional Placeholders can be removed or added to templates at any time.  If you see a placeholder that looks like {name} or {address1}, then you can safely remove them from the template (in most cases). 

A good example of using optional placeholders, would be to add a custom User4 field to the results list.  Lets say for instance, that you have a custom User4 field that holds a location's Manager Name.  You can add the {user4} placeholder to your template, and the Manager's Name for a location will be printed to the screen.  It's that simple!

Please see our next section for specific help on customizing your templates.