By Brian Carnell
The template system built into Conversant is great for getting your pages to look just right, but templates work pretty much everywhere and you can save a lot of time later by planning ahead and using templates now for some common features.
Here's a situation I found myself in recently: I had hundreds of advanced query pages that I used to create topical directory pages. So one AQP would show all the stories I'd written about Microsoft, another all the stories about AMD, etc. I had set up a page theme to make it easy to quickly create those pages, but then disaster struck -- I wanted to make some minor changes in how the output looked. But that would mean going into each of those pages and changing the text of the Page Content Template, the Query Result Template, and the Message Template (i.e., a lot more work than I wanted to do). Or at the very least, changing the page theme and applying it hundreds of times -- and then repeating the process if I ever decided to make any more changes in the future.
Instead I did what I should have done in the first place. I went into the Templates section of my Conversation and created templates there for each of the templates. In my case, I called them:
Aqp_faq_page_content_template
Aqp_faq_query_result_template
Aqp_faq_message_template
Then in the AQP Results Settings tab, I simply put <!--#inserttemplate name="Aqp_faq_page_content_template"--> in the Page Content Template area and so on.
Now, any pages using those templates can be changed almost instantly simply by editing the templates in one location rather than having to edit every single Advanced Query Page. If you've got a lot of pages that use identical templates, this is the only way to fly.
