There nothing technically different between Pro_News Article Templates - the ones used to display the articles - and any other Dragonfly templates. But they are employed a little differently, so the description here will hopefully save template or theme designers a little experimentation time.

Pro_News article templates are stored in a separate dedicated directory within the theme, this is primarily to allow new templates to be added and selected easily in Admin > Pro_News > Config without worry of selecting a non-Article template.

Template Structure

Each Article Template needs to consist of 5 parts:

newsempty to display simple text or error messages.

newshdline to display headlines only in home.

newshome to display articles without main content field in home.

newsarticle to display entire article (on its own).

gallery to display a "More Photos" gallery page.

preview_article to display the small block between the preview and submit article when user selects Preview.

cblk_hdline a simplified version of newshdline to display headlines in the center block.

Update: cblk_hdline now moved out into its own, 2, templates ctrblk_up.html and ctrblk_down.html, in order to allow Pro_News blocks to be displayed when Pro_News is the active m odule.


newsempty and preview_article are typically going to be constant across all templates for a given theme, but they are small and stored here just for consistency and simplicity.

It should follow from this that each article needs 3 template entries - newshdline, newshome and newsarticle.

A couple of other items to note:
- newshdline has 2 levels, in order to facilitate a unique format for the first record, plus a common format for subsequent records;
- both newshdline and newshome requires 2 pagebreaks to be defined at the beginning of the definition, the first for display at a Section break, the second at a Category break (note that a Category break will always occur immediately after a Section break so the theme design needs to allow for this);
- if you do not want a display feature you can just drop it from your copy of the template, e.g. if you don't want Section and Category title breaks, simply remove them from the template!

Remember: When you create your own templates, copy an existing template to a new name and modify that copy. Pro_News > Config will find the new template name for you to select automatically. Not only will this copy step allow you to switch back and forth if there is a problem, but it also means that your new template will not get overwritten in a Pro_News release update. (I'll keep my standard article templates all starting with "index", so you are free to pick just about anything else.)

Finally, there are now Submit templates in the submit folder, to match - by name - each Article template. This allows control over what fields the user can input. So if you create an Article template which is significantly different, say it drops Image Captions, then you will want to create a matching Submit folder template that also omits Image Captions. If you forget to create a Submit template, Pro_News will use the default submit.html template, in which case all input features will be available.