sga_santa | Admin: HTML files

Dear all

Remember how I said that

aithine was working on an easy to use template for the stories hosted on my website? Well, she's done it, and here is an example of how it will look using one of last year's stories, Leah's The Sacrificial Mage:

Last year's template

This year's template

The main difference - other than being much neater than my attempt ::g:: - is that the notes etc are in a php file, which will make it easier to edit author names in at the reveal, and to edit the link back to the

sga_santa post for that story.

If anyone is feeling particularly html savvy and would like to code their own stories, here is a link to the template-info.php file, which contains all of the story notes etc. Please note that this is not obligatory. If you just send us the story file, we're quite happy to code it up for you and it may be easier for us to do it anyway if it's something you're not entirely used to. This is just for people like me who like messing around with this stuff ::g::

How to...

First extract the template-info.php file and save it as something related to your story name, for example, for Leah's story, the php file is mage-info.php

Change the bits that are in capitals to be specific to your story, e.g. title, recipient, summary etc. These should come from your story file, but please leave these notes in the story file as well (with any LJ coding) for the moment - when I get the file, I'll remove these notes but use them for the actual post to the community that links to the story.

If you want to have paragraph breaks within any particular element, for example in your author's notes, please use the following code rather than hard returns:

Hard returns break the php :)

Couple of things to be aware of that also breaks php:

- as it's an external webpage, not hosted on livejournal, LJ specific tags like the lj user code won't work, so please don't include them in the info file [leave anything like that in the notes in the story file]

- as it's php, please use html tags for quote marks [& quot ; without the spaces] rather than " and ' for any notes included within the actual php file, as php treats quote marks as indictation of instructions

Then all you need to do with the text file is either insert paragraph coding [<p> tags] or line breaks [<br> tags] at the end of each paragraph/for each line break, and make sure that the info file and text file use the same name for the story [e.g. for Leah's story, the php file is mage-info.php and the text file is mage.txt - one word might work better as less chance of typos :)].