Editing the appearance of website folders
When you want to change the home page, layout page, print page, search results page or style definition of a website folder, you have different possibilities to do so.
o Selection of a different predefined home page or other resource document.
o Creation and activation of your own home page or other resource document.
o Editing of the active home page or other resource document.
o Deactivation of the home page or other resource document.
Selecting predefined resource documents
You select a different predefined home page or other resource document as the active one for your website folder as follows.
•
Select 
from the action menu of the website folder and go to the section ‘Appearance’ of
the action form.
• Choose the aspect of the appearance of the website folder that you want to change, e.g. Layout Page, and select a new system default layout from the options offered below ‘Add Layout Page’. Proceed for the other types of resource documents and add the resource documents selected to your website folder by hitting [OK]. These new pages become the active home page, layout page etc. and determine the appearance of the website folder.
• The old home page, layout page etc. are deactivated by this action, but not replaced. This way they may be reactivated at a later point in time.
You can also add and activate a new predefined home page, layout page or style definition
• by
selecting
,
or
in the action menu of the website folder.
Creating and activating your own resource documents
You can also create the documents that determine the appearance yourself: upload them to your website folder, copy and edit existing pages and style sheets, or move such documents from other website folders to the current one. Resource documents like layout pages, print pages, search results pages and style definitions should be placed into the Resources folder. You activate such resource documents created by yourself as follows.
•
Select
from the action menu of the website folder and go to the section ‘Appearance’ of
the action form.
• Choose an aspect of the appearance, e.g. Layout Page, and select one of your own pages from the drop-down menu below ‘Select Layout Page’ as the new layout page. The currently active page or style sheet is pre-selected in the menu. Proceed for other aspects and finally activate the pages and style sheets selected by hitting [OK].
When you plan to create your own home pages or other
resource documents, have a look at the predefined pages provided by the system
and make yourself familiar with the BSCW elements used in these documents (see
8.6.4 Using BSCW elements). Layout pages and print
pages have to contain the special element [element content] exactly
once. This is the place where the other pages of the website folder, the content
pages, are embedded into the layout page and the page to be printed is embedded
into the printing template. Further, you are free to use all BSCW elements in
layout and print pages. These elements, however, will be evaluated against
the embedded page, not against the layout or print page itself. If you have,
e.g., included a BSCW element to display the page’s size, the size of the
embedded page will be displayed, not the size of the layout page.
For creating your own style definitions you have to be familiar with style sheets. In any case, have a look at the predefined style definition that comes with a freshly created website folder.
Directly editing active resource documents
You can directly edit active home pages and other active resource documents in the folder Resources. Also in this case you should make yourself familiar with the predefined system pages and the BSCW elements used therein.
•
Select
in the action menu of the document concerned, edit the document and confirm
with [OK].
• You
can also use
,
or
.
in the action menu of the website folder to directly edit the active home page,
layout page or style definition.
If you have activated automatic versioning for the website folder, these actions generate new version of the documents edited. In this case, you can return to a former design by deleting more recent versions of home page or other resource documents.
For details about editing HTML pages in website folders see the previous section.
Deactivating resource documents
You may use the action
to deactivate the home page and other resource documents.
• In the section ‘Appearance’ select ‘No home page’, ‘No layout page’ etc. from the drop-down menu below ‘Select Home Page’, ‘Select Layout Page’ etc. and confirm with [OK].
Deactivating the home page (for reasons whatsoever) makes a website folder appear as an ordinary folder.
Adapting style definitions in case of server upgrades
Should your BSCW server be upgraded, it may happen that your style definitions do not match the new version of website folders. In this case, you get a very prominent error message advising you to upgrade your style definitions too. Style definitions of website folders are not automatically adapted when your BSCW server is upgraded, since style definitions are documents that may have been edited by you or other users.
If you use only predefined system style sheets, you have to only create (and thereby activate) a new predefined style sheet for your website folder as described above. If you use your own style sheets, you have two possibilities.
o You could incorporate your changes (e.g. a different colour scheme) into a new predefined style sheet.
o You could edit your existing
style definition to match the new website folder version. To this end, you have
to at least enter the current version number into the first line of the style
definition document, e.g. /*bscw-style-v2*/. Compare your style
definition with the current predefined style definition, from which your
definition has been derived, and carry out the necessary changes.
How to edit active style definitions has also been described above.
If you continue to use style definitions that do not match the current version of website folders, various errors may occur: action menus are not displayed correctly, navigation in tree-like website folders does no longer work properly and more recent BSCW elements do not work at all. So, you should not ignore the respective error message.