FORSSA - Frequently asked questions

How to remove the FORSSA News area in subpages of your site [by Lutz Sindermann]
Different layouts for the starting page and the remaining subpages require different templates. By default, the main FORSSA template places a News column on the right side of all webpages. To keep this News area for the starting page only and have it removed for the subpages requires either some added logic to the main FORSSA template or a second, different template. Lutz chose to go the second route. Here is how. Start by switching to Designer Mode and opening the main FORSSA template called "forssa". Select everything and copy. Then create a new template and paste the main templates code into your new template, thereby overwriting the default code. Remove the code from

up to the first instance of

</td>

Finally, search for the occurance of colspan="3" in the template code (three times) and change each one to colspan="2". Done. You now have a FORSSA template which you can assign to individual articles and which will have no News area, thereby enlarging the space for the Main area.

Another way to accomplish this would have been to make the appearance of the News area conditional upon the presence of text in a specific article field (the about field, for example, is unused in FORSSA) and to add conditional CityScript statements such as {$if blank .about$} to the appropriate parts of the main FORSSA template - namely around the  and the three occurences of the colspan statement. One main template would still be sufficient.

How to add a Home-Link to the Navigation Area?

To add a permanent link to the FORSSA Navigation Area, such as a 'Home' link as the first menu item on all pages, we have to change the main variable defining the navigation items. Switch to View -> Designer Mode in CityDesk and click on the variables button.

The list of FORSSA variables opens. Scroll-down to the textNavigation variable and double-click on it to edit its value. At the beginning of the string, replace <div class="naviFont">{$foreach by inserting <a href="#" class="naviMargin">Home</a> between

<div class="naviFont">

and

{$foreach

so that it becomes

<div class="naviFont"><a href="#" class="naviMargin">Home</a>{$foreach...etc

Replace the "#" by the magic name of your index article and modify the menu string ('Home') to your liking.

Save the new variable value and close the variables window. Click on Preview. Done.

How to graphically enhance the FORSSA Left Area [by Alan E. Christian]

Adding a background graphic to the Left Area of the FORSSA Wizard is rather straightforward as we will demonstrate. Switch to Designer Mode and open the main FORSSA template. Here you will see the following code snippet

 <td width=

and more. Change this to

 <td class="leftColumn" width=

adding class="leftColumn" before the width-statement. Save and close the template. In CityDesk, open the /admin/stylesheet/forssa.css file by double-clicking on it (its a text file, a so-called stylesheet) and add the following lines

.leftcolumn { background-image: url(background.jpg); background-repeat: repeat-y; }

Exchange "background.jpg" in this example with the magic name of one of your graphics. Hit Preview and look at the result. Nothing changed ? You probably forgot to copy the "dot" before "leftColumn" when you added the lines above to your stylesheet.

As you notice, the Left Area navigation now has a vertically-repeated background image. There are more options than that:

repeat = what is says, repeated in all dimensions
repeat-x = repeated horizontally
no-repeat = put only once at the top left (very useful)