Lightnote CMS - web 2.0 content management system

Getting started

All templates in Lightnote CMS are based on Smarty Template Engine. If you have no experience with Smarty, I recommend you to read Basic Syntax section before continue.

Page templates are located in templates/pages/[TEMPLATE_NAME] directory. The name of template can contain only alphanumeric characters (a-z, 0-9) and underscore (_).

Page and Content templates must have at least 2 files:

  1. Configuration file: config.xml (XML configuration file).
  2. Html template: index.html (Smarty template).

It is very important to save all your template files in UTF-8 encoding to avoid many problems associated with inappropriate display of special characters.

Configuration (config.xml)

You can see a sample configuration file below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<PageTemplate>
    <friendlyName>My Template</friendlyName>
    <author>Dmitry Monin</author>
    <version>1.0</version>
    <structure>
        <column>
            <friendlyName>Content</friendlyName>
            <width>60%</width>
        </column>
        <column>
            <friendlyName>Sidebar</friendlyName>
            <width>40%</width>
        </column>
    </structure>
</PageTemplate>
NodeName Level Required Description
PageTemplate 1 Yes Root node of Configuration file
friendlyName 2 Yes Name of template which will be shown in CMS Backend.
author 2 No Author of template.
version 2 No Version of template.
structure 2 Yes Structure of template. This node contains configuration of how many columns has template.
column 3 Yes Must be placed inside of column node. Contains configuration of column.
friendlyName 4 Yes Name of column which will be displayed in CMS backend.
width 4 No This parameter specifies how wide should be column in CMS backend. It may be needed if template contains more than one column. Value should be in percents. For example: <width>50%</width>.
contentTemplates 2 No In case you create your own templates for content elements (text, text&image or rich text editor), you have to specify path to each template file.
text 3 No Path to Text element template (relative to page template path).
textimage 3 No Path to Text&Image element template (relative to page template path).
rte 3 No Path to Rich Text Editor element template (relative to page template path).

* Name of all nodes are case sensitive.

Template file (index.html)

Template file is a Smarty template and should be named index.html.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
    <title>{$page->GetTitle()}</title>
    {$page->GetHeaderHtml()}
</head>
<body>
    <h1>{$page->name}</h1>
    <div id="menu">{menu from=0 active_class="on"}</div>
    <div id="content">{content column=0} </div>
    <div id="sidebar">{content column=1} </div>
</body>
</html>

You can use following smarty variables and functions inside your template:

{$page} - Instance of a Page class for current page. Most common fields and methods are:

Field / Method Description
{$page->id} Page ID (integer), unique identifier of each page.
{$page->name} Returns name of current page.
{$page->GetTitle()} Returns title of current page (which will be displayed in browser caption).
{$page->GetHeaderHtml()}
 Returns data which should be written into page header (between tags).
{$page->GetSubPages()}
 Returns an indexed array of subpages.


{content} - smarty function to render page content.

Attribute name Type Required


Default Description
column Integer Yes n / a Index of column (starting from zero, for example if you have 3 columns in your template, first column will have index 0, second 1, third 2).


{menu} - smarty function to render menu navigation.

Attribute name Type Required Default Description
from Integer (Page Id) / Page object Yes n / a Id of a page, subpages of which should be listed in menu.
levels Integer No 1 Number of menu levels to render for a menu.
outer String No li Html elements outside A element. You can specify more than one element by separating them with | character (e.g. "li|em").
inner String No empty Html elements inside A tags. You can specify more than one element by separating them with | character (e.g. "b|em").
id_prefix String No menu-item- Prefix for id attribute applied to each menu item.
separator String No empty Separator between menu items.
active_class String No active Class name of active menu item (applied to outer element).
parent_class String No parent-active Class name of menu item, which is parent to active menu item (applied to outer element).
first_class String No first Class name of first menu item.
last_class String No last Class name of last menu item.


{assign_menu} - smarty function to assign array of sub pages (instances of type Page) to specified variable for further use in your template (for example to create menu with specific html code).

Attribute name Type Required Default Description
from Integer (Page Id) / Page object Yes n / a Id of a page, subpages of which should be listed in menu.
var String Yes n / a Variable name.