Custom Headers and Footers

The best way to integrate Connect Daily into a website is to use custom headers and footers. You can specify custom HTML that appears at the top and bottom of the generated calendar. Using this technique, you can make Connect Daily look and feel exactly like the rest of your website.

Custom headers and footers are only displayed to users who are not logged in.

Tip

You can use the Edit Custom Header Screen to easily create a custom header. You can use the Change Colors Screen to customize the colors used.

When a calendar is displayed, the following takes place:

1. The system checks for a custom header or footer file specified for that calendar. If no header or footer is specified at the calendar level, then the software checks the system configuration to see if global default headers and footers are specified.
2. If custom headers and footers are displayed, then the custom header is written to the browser.
3. The body of the calendar is written to the browser.
4. If a custom footer is specified, then that information is sent to the browser.
5. The closing tags for the page are sent to the browser.
6. The server response to the browser is finished.

As mentioned above, you can specify custom headers and footers globally in the SYSTEM | CONFIGURATION | APPEARANCE screen or at the calendar level.

Connect Daily will look for custom headers and footers in the custom/<language> directory. If your browser language is set to Spanish, then Connect Daily will look for the header in the custom/es directory. If it doesn't find an entry there, it will look in the custom/en directory for an English version. Connect Daily ships with sample custom header and footer files in the custom/en directory.

The default header and footer files created by the Edit Custom Header screen and the hosted version of Connect Daily are named:

• custom/en/userHeader.html
• custom/en/userFooter.html

You can also specify custom header and footer pages for each calendar. If a value is present at the calendar level, the name of the header or footer files specified will override the defaults specified in the configuration.properties.

Things to note with custom headers and footers:

1. The custom header must be a complete valid HTML header block, including the DOCTYPE, HTML tag, HEAD tag with style sheet specification, and BODY tag.
2. Files should be encoded as UTF-8.
3. The custom footer must not contain closing BODY and HTML tags.

We recommend that you test the completed pages using the HTML Validator at http://validator.w3.org/.