Creating The Front Page

Okay, now to create the front page template in FreeMarker.

Keep in mind that I'm not a web designer, so I'm not going to attempt to make these pages look pretty. That's part of the advantage of using a templating system...as long as I put the data into the data model for the template, I can create whatever ugly page I want and later have someone else rewrite the template to look nice. It'll still all work.

We've seen before that a FreeMarker template is just HTML with some FreeMarker code mixed in. See my previous post on Creating A FreeMarker Template if you missed it.

I'm going to start with that template, since it was designed to be the front page, and already has a Sign In/Sign Out link on it.

I want to have a set of links across the top that show based on the level of the user. Some of this is context dependent. A member might be a contestant in one contest, a judge in another, etc. Site administrators are special, though, so we'll add a field to the User object to account for them. I'll call this field userLevel, and a 0 in that field will indicate a member (who might be a contestant, judge, or contest admin) and a 1 in that field will indicate a site admin.

The user level will need to be added to the data model for the front page. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader...it follows the same pattern we've done before. Be sure to also add it to RPXResults.java so it's set similar to the user name. If you get a NullPointerException when running this, it's probably because you forgot to update users already in the data store to set their user level.

So the links across the top will be: Sign In/Sign Out, My Profile, My Contests, Admin. I'll leave off the forums for now and we'll handle those later.

Here's the FreeMarker template code for this:


<#if loggedIn>
<a href="/signout">Sign Out, ${name}</a>
  
<a href="/profile">My Profile</a>
  
<a href="/contests">My Contests</a>
<#if (userLevel > 0)>
  
<a href="/admin">Admin</a>
</#if>
<#else>
<a class="rpxnow" onclick="return false;"
href="https://omega.rpxnow.com/openid/v2/signin?token_url=http://localhost:8080/rpxresults">
Sign In
</a>
</#if>


This just builds on what we already did. Note, though, the embedded if statement to see if we should show site admin level links. The parentheses around the condition are important, otherwise FreeMarker will see the greater than sign as the end of the tag, not as a condition.

Also note that the URLs given for the links don't go anywhere yet. We'll have to add those pages.

I also want some text explaining what the site is about, and a list of current activity. The list of current activity will have to wait until we have more of the site done, and the text explaining what the site is about isn't very interesting in terms of programming, so we'll stop here.

The next step is to allow the user to edit their profile. This will get rid of the ugly display name and replace it with one of the user's choosing.