Call me stupid, but I don't understand templates in Quanta Plus. Here's what I am trying to do:

I am working on a website. I don't want to use frames, and there is a pretty complex CSS-only navigation with drop down menus, opening a number of subpages.

Now it is perfectly possible that at a later date there might be additions to the menu. I'd rather not have to edit every single page by hand to add that new entry.

Looking at the documentation for templates, it seems that it should be possible to create a template with a pre text including the document head and navigation, and a post text including the foot. But I don't understand how this is supposed to work. Here's what I tried:

1. I created a subfolder 'main' in the project template view under project templates. I opened the properties of the new folder and added the pre and post texts in the appropriate window, checked the mark for including them.

2. I created a blank page and saved it as a document template inside that folder, supposing the text would be added then. It wasn't.

3. I created a new page from the empty template page to see whether the pre and post texts would be inserted then. Nope. I have no idea how and where these texts ever get inserted.

I know that a complete page layout can be saved as a template to work from, but that's not what I have been looking for. The way I read the documentation I suppose the following should be possible somehow, I'm just too daft to get the 'how':

1. A template with pre and post text includes the fixed parts.

2. Various files contain the contents of the individual pages of the site without the fixed parts.

3. The latter can be connected to the former to create the complete pages because the fixed parts are added in front of and after the content of the individual pages. These pages will then be uploaded.

4. Whenever the navigation actually changes, I will only have to edit the pre text of the template to reflect the change, then reconnect the content pages from point 2 and the template to generate the full pages anew, which I will then overwrite the old pages with.

Did I get that right? How can it be done? Or is there a different solution?

Robin

I could not figure it out either.

Ended up writing a php menu generator with all menu items that I included in every file.