New pages created to operate under Pictools, should be created as an instance of this template. (Under DreamWeaver. Users of other development tools will have to employ some similar capability.)

Page layout options provided by PhyspicsMain template

With PhyspicsMain.dwt, pages follow the pattern shown at the right: top rows, bottom rows, and a middle row of left columns, a single "body" cell, and right columns. Contents of the rows and columns are configurable via properties. PhyspicsMain also includes beginpage.php. Changes to this file will instantly affect all Pictools pages.  All these inclusions via properties are intended to mitigate the fact that the template is copied and cannot be easily changed without revisiting all pages,

Four properties in Pictools.properties dictate the contents of the extra rows and coulmns. Their default values are

page.toprow: dirbar.php title.php
page.leftcell: blankleftcolumn.php 
page.rightcell: adcolumn.php    
page.bottomrow: copyright.php

The template links to /GeneralStyles.php and calls SiteProps:linkstyles() to incorporate stylesheets named styles.css from the current and parent directories. (The little file /styles.css exists as a workaround for DreamWeaver's penchant for showing fonts too small.)

Classes assigned to elements of the page:

toprow, toprowk, bottomrow, bottomrowk, 
leftcolumn leftcolumnk, rightcolumn rightcolumnk, 
bodyrow, bodycell 

where k is the index (starting from 0) of the row or column in the group.

A misconceived property, bodytable.addtoclassattr, is appended to the class attribute for the page body. The value of this property must include an apostrophe, which ends the class value. Text before the apostrophe appends classes to the list. Text after the apostrophy adds attributex to the body tag. For instance, this is how the onload attribute can be added.

Changes

As more pages get added to your site it becomes increasingly problematic to change the template. So starting a new project is a good time to make any changes. Here are some changes I would make.

• Convert to HTML5.
• Fix the addtoclassattr embarrassment. There is no need to assign a class to the body tag because there is only one body tag. There is a need for a property that adds additional attributes to the body tag. This change will require changes to /library/frame.php, /library/thumbs.php, and /pictools/doc/index.php