Templates and Stylesheets

Templates determine the layout of a page whilst stylesheets define the visual look of the page.  The Vectorlight CMS uses both of these to provide the maximum amount of flexibility for website designers.

Templates

You will find the templates at webroot/templates/standard.  The sample website provided with the CMS contains two templates home.ascx and default.ascx.  The template named editor.ascx is used by the CMS editor and should not be changed.

To create a new template it is recommended you take an existing one (home.ascx for example) and modify it as necessary.  To create a new template or edit an existing one you will need to be skilled in HTML and also ASP.NET would be an advantage.  Before performing any editing it is strongly advised that you backup the templates folder before making any changes as these will be reflected on the live website immediately.

Stylesheets

You will find the stylesheets at webroot/templates/assets.  Style.css contains the styles relevant to the website as a whole whilst the select subfolder contains user selectable stylesheets.

User Selectable Stylesheets

It is these that you can create new instances to give CMS editors extra choices for styling pages.  You will need knowledge of css to be able to create/edit stylesheets and it is strongly recommended that you backup the assets folder before any changes to the stylesheets are made.

Styles Attributes Usable in the CMS Editor

The CMS Editor uses the Silverlight plugin to render HTML and as such not all CSS attributes can be rendered.

• font family
• font size
• vertical-align
• text-align
• margin
• background (#RRGGBB hex codes only)
• color (#RRGGBB hex codes only)
• font-weight
• font-style
• text-decoration

Although the Silverlight text rendered can only render the following you can define any CSS and this will be rendered on the final web page as normal.