I agree with Dean, however I also know the extra motivation a personally significant challenge can provide... Definately having a look at existing templates will give you a good idea, but in essesnce:
You can do a "viewsource" of any page on the web, copy and paste it into the template library in Etomite and it will be available to use (except you will probably be breaking a range of copyright laws) but the idea is there. However you will notice a few things when you apply it to a page and view it...
1) It won't look the same (that's because you need to point the css file to the correct place where ever it is).
2) The pictures won't show up (that's because you need to point to them correctly: select and
save-as the pictures and save to your server).
3) Your navigation will be hard-coded and you will need to re-code this every time you make a structural change to the folders (or use a snippet as suggested above that makes these changes automatically).
4) The content in your etomite page does not show up (that is because the individual's page content is called into the template by typing [*content*] where you want it to show.
Each of these steps start to take advantage of the power of Etomite... Try this activity to help to see how it all works (don't just read it, you will learn more by actually DOING it!):
1) Put this code in your manager- template library
<html>
<head>
<title>My first etomite page</title>
</head>
<body>
This is my first etomite test template.
</body>
</html>
call it something like "my_template"
2) Apply the "my_template" template to any existing page (edit/publishing/users template) and view it...pretty boring hey.
3) Now put in some snippets that do Etomite stuff like
<html>
<head>
<title>My first etomite page</title>
</head>
<body>
This is my first etomite test template.
[[ListMenu]]
[*content*]
</body>
</html>
You should now see navigation and page content.
Once you know how to put Etomite stuff
INTO a page, you will then know what to take
OUT of an
existing non-etomite template and how to
REPLACE it with dynamic content using
snippets and
chunks.
