You can get all the templates here. Just select the one template you wish to use and disregard the others.
I really like the pMachine product. It is simple to use and fast to setup. The greatest strength of the pMachine product is the ability to embed pM tags anywhere in your HTML to display entries or archives and a variety of other functions.
But for newcomers to HTML and CSS this is also a great weakness because the weblog creator needs to understand to some degree how HTML works in order to create a new site or integrate pMachine into an existing site.
So I designed these simple templates to help people get started with a weblog design. They are mostly bare bones designs with very simple HTML and CSS. The idea being that you take the layout and framework and add your own designs, images and ideas. I'd recommend playing around with the CSS to tweak the layouts to your requirements - the best way to learn how to manipulate CSS is to see the results for yourself.
The zip file contains all the files required to use the templates. It has the following directory
structure:
/ - contains the readme.txt file, this install.html file and the RSS feed files.
css - contains the all.css file which contains all the CSS required to present the sites - fonts, font sizes, paragraph styles, etc - other
than the layout itself. If you move the weblog files around you need to make sure the style statements in the weblog files to point them
to the new location of the all.css file.
images - contains the images used in the layout - most of them come from the great
Steal These Buttons site.
2colml - the files required for the 2 Column Left Menu layout. Including the CSS file containing the layout.
2colmr - the files required for the 2 Column Right Menu layout. Including the CSS file containing the layout.
2colala - the files required for the 2 Column ALA Menu layout. Including the CSS file containing the layout.
2colala2 - the files required for the 2 Column Reverse-ALA Menu layout. Including the CSS file containing the layout.
2colhfr - the files required for the 2 Column Header & Footer layout. Including the CSS file containing the layout.
3colflk - the files required for the 3 Column Flanking Menu layout. Including the CSS file containing the layout.
3colhed - the files required for the 3 Column with Header layout. Including the CSS file containing the layout.
nestdiv - the files required for the Nested Box layout. Including the CSS file containing the layout.
Installing the templates is easy!
1. First you need to install pMachine. Follow the installation instructions that come with pMachine.
2. When you have installed pMachine then chose which template you'd like to use, we'll use the example of the 2 Column
Right Menu template.
3. Once you have selected the template you will see that its files are stored in their own directory. So all the files required
for the 2 Column Right Menu template are in the directory 2colmr. You need to move these files to the weblog location you defined as part of
the pMachine install - mostly likely the base directory of your web site.
4. Also in this directory is a file called 2colmr.css which contains the CSS required for the layout alone. The other
CSS is contained in a file called all.css located in the css directory off the root of the directory tree. In order to properly use the
templates you really need both files - the templates will look pretty ordinary without the colours and styles associated with the layout.
Since you've moved the template files around you need to ensure the links to the css files are accurate. The two css files are linked using different methods.
The layout CSS file, in this case, 2colmr.css, is linked using an import tag. This hides the CSS from older browsers allowing the content to be displayed in an unstructured but readable manner.
You need to adjust the tag to point to the new location of the CSS files. For example if you placed the CSS files in a directory called css in the same directory as the weblog files the import tag would look like this:
<style type="text/css" media="all">
@import "css/2colmr.css"; <!-- Layout CSS - contains the CSS required for this layout -->
</style>
The second CSS file contains all the presentation CSS and is linked into the template file using the link tag like so:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/all.css" /> <!-- Presentation CSS - included in all layouts and defines the look and feel -->
The above tag assumes that the all.css file has been moved into the same css directory as the 2colmr.css file.
You need to remember to change all the CSS links in all of the template files.
5. Now rename the files to a format that suits you - remember to keep the .php extension to allow your server to process the files as .php (there are methods of changing the
extension to .htm or .html - like using .htaccess files -
but these are outside the scope of this document - please check your web server's documentation for details).
6. Once you've renamed these files you need to tell pMachine where they are and what they are called. This is defined
in the Weblog Management section of the pMachine Control Panel. Click on the weblog you wish to manage and input the names of the files in
the relevant fields. The template files are essentially similar to the files contained in the standard template that comes with pMachine. For example:
2colmr_weblog.php is equivalent to weblog.php
2colmr_archives.php is equivalent to archives.php
etc, etc...
Thus you change the entry for Main Weblog Page to whatever you have renamed 2colmr_weblog.php to and Comments Page to whatever you have renamed 2colmr_comments.php to and so on.
You should note that several files - 2colmr_categorysum.php, 2colmr_archivesum.php and 2colmr_search.php for example don't need to
be referenced in the Weblog Management section. They are self-contained files. You also don't need to fill in all the page references - for example none of the templates have a More page. You should read the pMachine documentation to achieve a greater understanding of how this is
setup.
NOTE: If you wish the basic and advanced search functions to resemble your template then you need to modify the files contained in the search directory contained within your pMachine distribution - otherwise when you click on the Search button you will be taken to a page with the default pMachine layout - not your new layout. Hopefully with the instructions contained within here this should be an easy task - just duplicate one of the weblog files - 2colmr_weblog.php for example and copy in the tags contained in the index.html file contained in the
search directory. You'll need to experiment with this to get it right.
7. You then also may want to make some changes to the internal pMachine templates and settings. See here for details of what changes I made to the templates.
When you use a pMachine tag like:
<?php weblog_entries($id,"news"); >
You are actually inserting not only your content (for example in the above entry a weblog entry from the news weblog) but some additional HTML surrounding that entry. This HTML is contained within the pMachine templates. You can access these templates by clicking on the Edit Templates link in the pMachine Control panel.
I have made the following changes to the internal pMachine templates. You don't need to make these changes or you may wish to make different changes to suit your own design. The only one I would recommend making is adding the Weblog Spacer in the Weblog Multi-entry Template.
Weblog Multi-Entry Template
Weblog Single-Entry Template
This is reached through the Weblog Management link on the pMachine Control Panel. Select the Weblog you wish to change and their preferences will be displayed.
In it in Weblog Management that you define the location and names of your various weblog pages (best bet is to read the pMachine documentation for information on this). So as mentioned above if you rename your weblog files to better suit your site then you need to update those name changes here.
Changed the number of entries displayed on the main weblog page to 3.
Your RSS Factory settings are available through the RSS Factory link under the ADMIN section of the Control Panel. In the RSS Factory I created two feeds - using two different RSS versions - and linked them to buttons in each layout. I then added all the pMTemplate weblogs into the feed. The RSS feeds files are located in the / directory.
Email me here.
Visit the pMachine Home Page and especially the pMachine forums here.
The CSS-discuss web page and list.
Google - it's a great resource for learning about CSS and HTML coding.