Creating, editing and setting the home and layout pages

If you have no layout or home page specified for a website folder, you can specify them as follows:

•      Create HTML documents to serve as layout and/or home pages on your local com­puter and upload them to your website folder. Alternatively, you may copy and paste layout and/or home pages from existing website folders.

•      Select   Change    Properties  from the action menu of the website folder and declare the new HTML documents as the layout or home page of the website folder by se­lecting them in the selection menus Layout page or Home page of the ‘Change Prop­erties’ form.

As a second possibility you may also

•      select   New    Layout Page  or   New    Home Page  in the action menu of the web­site folder and choose from two options to have a layout or home page generated.

When you set a new layout or home page and there is already an active layout or home page in place, the old layout or home page is made inactive, but it is not replaced by the new layout or home page. The old page may be reactivated later on.

You may edit active layout and home pages in place using the actions   Change    Layout Page  or   Change    Home Page  as shortcuts. These actions are offered only if the website folder has an active layout or home page.

While an active home page is mandatory for the primary function of a website folder, i.e. to appear as a sort of website instead of as a normal folder, the layout page is optional. It is, however, very useful to achieve a consistent page design and may help with navigation in the website folder and provide additional information on its pages.

When you plan to design your own layout pages, have a look at the source code of the pre­defined layout pages first. You should keep in mind two facts. Layout pages have to contain the special element [element content] exactly once. This is the place where the other pages of the website folder, the content pages, are embedded in the layout page. Further, you are free to use all BSCW elements (see 5.5.4 Using BSCW elements) also in lay­out pages. These elements will, however, be evaluated against the embedded page, not against the layout page itself. If you have, e.g., included a BSCW element to display the page’s size, the size of the embedded page will be displayed, not the size of the layout page.

You may also use the action   Change    Properties  to deactivate a home or layout page by selecting ‘(no home page)’ or ‘(no layout page)’ in the respective menus of the ‘Change Properties’ form. Deactivating the home page (for reasons whatsoever) makes a website folder appear as an ordinary folder.