Templating your events in Expectnation

Giving your Expectnation events a custom look-and-feel is simple to do, but also has the power to let experienced web developers completely customize an event site.

Expectnation’s templating system is composed of two layers: templates and Liquid components.

Templates

Templates, the first layer, allows straightforward theming: use custom page headers, footers, sidebars and CSS. You can enter HTML to go in the various places on the page, and use the navigation editor to create a menu. CSS and Javascript can be stored in the template, and images and other resources stored in the assets module.

You can do a lot with the template system, but sometimes designers will want to “break out of the box” into a more flexible page layout.

A screen capture of Web 2.0 Expo, designed by O’Reilly Media in Expectnation.

Liquid components

The second layer is the Liquid components, which form the underlying mechanism for how the theme templates are actually turned into web pages. The name “Liquid” comes from the fact that Expectnation uses the Liquid templating language.

Liquid components give you free rein over the HTML content of your event site, allowing you to do simple computations and dynamic content. Many parts of Expectnation’s standard pages, such as schedule listings, can be customized via Liquid components. Data such as speakers, proposal and timings are available for you to insert into pages.

One advantage of the Liquid templating system is reuse: you can create a component which can be reused repeatedly over events and articles. Experienced web developers will find Expectnation’s Liquid components a mature and scalable approach to creating event web sites.

Expectnation’s online help has detailed reference material on the various components, data objects and filters made available to Liquid. To find out more about Liquid itself, visit its web site and read their getting started guide.

As much or as little as you like

Because templates and Liquid components work together, you don’t have to choose between them in producing your event web site. Most customers find templates can do 90% of the work, with just a little Liquid added for fine-tuning the pages.

Liquid support is in ongoing evolution inside Expectnation as we drive it deeper into the system, so we’re very open to requests for enhancements and new features.