Customizing HTML templates

Templates are simple HTML and CSS and include a few special tags that tell HelpBurner where to insert it's content in the publishing process. Because templates are so simple it's easy to customize them or create your own.

Templates folder

Templates are stored in the Templates folder in the HelpBurner folder. Example: \Documents\HelpBurner\Templates\HTML\

Every folder in the location above is a separate template that appears in the publishing window.

Creating or customizing templates

If you want to create a new template (or change an existing one), start by copying an existing templates folder and renaming it. For example, create a copy of the Good Looking folder in the HTML folder and rename it my new template (you could rename it anything).

Project and topic templates

Each template folder can contain a file called project.html and one called topic.html. Project.html is the template used if you are publishing a project and topic.html is used when publishing a topic. Your template must contain at least one of these files.

Including files in your template

Any additional files you wish to include in the template (images, style-sheets etc) need to be included in the template folder. In the above example, background.gif is an additional file used in the template. Sub-folders will be ignored by HelpBurner.

Special tags

Within your templates HTML files you must include special HelpBurner tags to tell HelpBurner where to insert it's content. See the template tags topic for a list of tags and their descriptions.

Customizing the HTML created by HelpBurner

HelpBurner styles the HTML it creates using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). For example, it's tables of contents are created using HTML un-ordered lists. Because the standard HTML tags are used you can completely customize how they look and work using CSS and optionally jQuery or some other JavaScript library - although in most cases CSS will be more than enough.

Open the project.html file from the Good Looking template folder to see how to customize things.