This post will focus on a key task you’ll encounter while working with any website: linking. To make linking as easy as possible, Hot Ink provides a series of Liquid filters that will build links to any Hot Ink page. Hot Ink linking helpers will automatically decide which text to use as the link text unless you’ve provided specific text as an argument. (more…)
Archive for the ‘Development’ Category
Template Data – Part 7: Linking
Thursday, October 29th, 2009Template Data – Part 6: The Section/Category Drop
Thursday, October 29th, 2009If you’ve been working with Hot Ink for a while, you may have noticed some overlap between the use of the terms “section” and “category”. In Hot Ink your newspaper can have many categories, those categories can have many subcategories, those subcategories can have their own subcategories and so on. We use the term “section” to refer specifically to your top-level categories, those that are not subcategories of any other category.
(more…)
Template Data – Part 5: The Blog Drop
Thursday, October 29th, 2009You can access your Hot Ink blogs from 2 different locations. The first is on the blog index page as the array variable ‘blogs’, the other is through the newspaper drop as ‘newspaper.blogs’. This can be used in combination with the ‘newspaper.latest_from_blog’ hash to run through a list of each blog and the latest posts in each blog.
For more information on how to work with Liquid data types like hashes and array, read: http://wiki.github.com/tobi/liquid/liquid-for-designers
Blog entries are available through the Article drop, with one added variable, an ‘entry.blogs’ array of all the blogs this entry is belongs to. In all but a few rare cases, you can access the entry’s blog data using the syntax ‘entry.blogs.first’. (more…)
Template Data – Part 4: The Issue Drop
Thursday, October 29th, 2009Issues represent the printed editions of your newspaper. You aren’t obligated to use issues to organize your content, but it does help readers navigate your site, especially those who are looking for an article that appeared in a certain issue of your newspaper. Issues are special; they can have an attached PDF.
Issue are generally accessed through the newspaper.latest_issues array, newspaper.latest_issue or through the “issues” array on an issues index page template.
(more…)
Template Data – Part 3: The Newspaper Drop
Thursday, October 29th, 2009Of all the data you’ll use to build Hot Ink templates, probably the most important is the data associated with your newspaper itself. The “newspaper drop” is available and contains the same data on all templates and no matter what the context.
To learn more about Liquid, the templating language used by Hot Ink, read the Liquid wiki at http://wiki.github.com/tobi/liquid
Your newspaper’s drop is the main piece of data used for building your template’s structure. If you’re interested in fleshing out your template with a little more data, be sure to take a good look at what’s inside this drop. We’re still adding new features to the site, so look forward to this drop expanding significantly over the next few month.
(more…)