5.2.1. Modular Structure of Templates
A glance at all articles of an online publication reveals that generally there are many layout similarities even across different sections of the publication. Taking advantage of such similarities is what the template structure of Campsite was meant to do. In other words: design features that remain the same for all articles only need to be specified once, e.g. the navigation from an article back to section and home, font type and size, background color and the like.
On the other hand, there are article components that vary between articles. For example, the top of the article might contain some specific logo to indicate which section it belongs to. In such a case, the templates are designed to work in a modular fashion, allowing you to call up templates within templates.
The modular structure of the templates can be illustrated well by the following example: If background color, font size and type are the same for all articles, they will be specified as plain HTML in the template. But differences between sections will be indicated within the structure of the template (see below) indicating "if this article belongs to the politics section, insert such-and-such template here, if it is sports, insert such-and-such, else: just use the following."
Templates can be stacked within each other. A template can be made to call another template and include the layout information at the position where it was called in the main template. The easiest way to illustrate this modular structure is by looking at a usual tree structure of folders on a computer. Starting from general categories, the deeper the structure, the more precise and specific the folder names and information.
The modular structure was introduced to keep redundancy to zero and therefore the layout work minimal. Any design changes need to be made only once in the templates, never even twice, if you make full use of this modularity potential.
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5.2.1. Modular Structure of Templates
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5.2. Templates In-depth