%myvars; ]> by Joel Aufrecht In this chapter, Configuring refers to making changes to a new OpenACS site through the web interface. In crude terms, these changes happen in the database, and are upgrade-safe. Customizing refers to changes that touch the file system, and require some planning if easy upgradability is to be maintained. Every page within an OpenACS site is part of a subsite More information). The home page of the entire site is the front page is a special, default instance of a subsite, served from /var/lib/aolserver/service0/www. If an index page is not found there, the default index page for all subsites is used. To customize the code on the front page, copy the default index page from the Subsite package to the Main site and edit it: cp /var/lib/aolserver/service0/packages/acs-subsite/www/index* /var/lib/aolserver/service0/www Edit the new index.adp to change the text; you shouldn't need to edit index.tcl unless you are adding new functionality. Almost all pages on an OpenACS site use ACS Templating, and so their appearance is driven by a layer of different files. Let's examine how this works: A templated page uses an ADP/TCL pair. The first line in the ADP file is usually: <master> If it appears exactly like this, without any arguments, the template processer uses default-master for that subsite. For pages in /var/lib/aolserver/service0/www, this is /var/lib/aolserver/service0/www/default-master.adp and the associated .tcl file. The default-master is itself a normal ADP page. It draws the subsite navigation elements and invokes site-master (/var/lib/aolserver/service0/www/site-master.adp and .tcl) The site-master draws site-wide navigation elements and invokes blank-master (/var/lib/aolserver/service0/www/blank-master.adp and .tcl). Blank-master does HTML housekeeping and provides a framework for special sitewide navigation "meta" elements such as Translator widgets and Admin widgets.