Design templates customized

C-Gator provides templates and styles ideally suited to generating web content. 

Firstly, templates give us a way to separate, abstract an informative part of the site (news text, articles and another content) from its design part (fonts, colors, a page layout, graphic elements of design). Thus, the content of the site is separated by resources such as "Page", "Text page", "Text" and its design is separated as well by templates and styles.

Second, since design is separated from content, an opportunity to completely change design without changing a informative part appears. It is enough to specify, it is necessary to use another resource as a template for pages, and a site design will be changed. Moreover, it is available to work with a design part of the site and concurrently work with its informative part. An editor writes news and at the same time a designer creates a new design; they work independently from each other. 

Template is a document in HTML format with an overall page layout. In a template it is specified where there is the page header, main menu, links to other site sections to the informative part. HTML tags indicate static parts of a page. Decorators indicate dynamic parts.

Decorators are special tags which are not in a ready-made page in a browser; a server processes them. Instead of a decorator any content is substituted and/or an action is performed; it is specified by the decorator's name and parameters. For example, the following decorator during processing a pattern is replaced by the page content given below while processing a template:

<decorator:ItemProperty runat="server" FieldName="content" />

The templates work in the following way:

1. A user does some action via a browser, e.g. clicks a link. 
2. C-Gator receives the request to retrieve a page.
3. The system defines that the page is tied to a template.
4. The template text displaying (but not the page text) process is launched. All tags processing starts as well. The browser retrives the HTML document from C-Gator. The user sees a new page.