Creating a new template

This is a brief tutorial covering the basics of building a common template.

Extending a base template

Firstly we need to extend a parent template to provide us with some basic page structure. This can be any other HTML page however the most common one is page.html which provides the full CKAN theme including header and footer.

{% extends "page.html" %}

The page.html template provides numerous blocks that can be extended. It’s worth spending a few minutes getting familiar with what’s available. The most common blocks that we’ll be using are those ending with “content”.

• primary_content: The main content area of the page.
• secondary_content: The secondary content (sidebar) of the page.
• breadcrumb_content: The contents of the breadcrumb navigation.
• actions_content: The content of the actions bar to the left of the breadcrumb.

Primary Content

For now we’ll add some content to the main content area of the page.

{% block primary_content %}
  {{ super() }}

  {% block my_content %}
    <h2>{{ _('This is my content heading') }}</h2>
    <p>{{ _('This is my content') }}</p>
  {% endblock %}
{% endblock %}

Notice we’ve wrapped our own content in a block. This allows other templates to extend and possibly override this one and is extremely useful for making a them more customisable.

Secondary Content

Secondary content usually compromises of reusable modules which are pulled in as snippets. Snippets are also very useful for keeping the templates clean and allowing theme extensions to override them.

{% block primary_content %}
  {{ super() }}

  {% block my_sidebar_module %}
    {% snippet "snippets/my-sidebar-module.html" %}
  {% endblock %}
{% endblock %}

Breadcrumb and Actions

There is a consistent breadcrumb running through all the pages and often it is useful to provide additional actions that a related to the page.

{% block breadcrumb_content %}
  <li class="active">{% link_for _('Viewing Dataset'), controller='package', action='read', id=pkg.id %}</li>
{% endblock %}

{% block actions_content %}
  {{ super() }}
  <li class="active">{% link_for _('New Dataset'), controller='package', action='new', class_='btn', icon='plus' %}</li>
{% endblock %}

Scripts and Stylesheets

Currently scripts and stylesheets can be added by extending the styles and scripts blocks. This is soon to be replaced with the {% resource %} tag which manages script loading for us.

{% block styles %}
  {{ super() }}
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="{% url_for_static "my-style.css" %}" />
{% endblock %}

{% block scripts %}
  {{ super() }}
  <script src="{% url_for_static "my-script.js" %}"></script>
{% endblock %}

Summary

And that’s about all there is to it be sure to check out base.html and page.html to see all the tags available for extension.