Please read the entire page before jumping in and turning your theme into Frankentheme.
The most frequently asked questions concerning this technique are:
1) Can I place a different banner on each page of my site? and,
2) Can I have a banner only on certain pages of my site?
The answer to both these questions is,”Yes”. However, prior to now, this has been difficult to do. The reason is that when you insert the Bannerzest code into the index.html document of your project, Rapidweaver uses that document as the basis for ALL pages in your project. If you wanted to change or delete a banner on a particular page, you were required to publish the Rapidweaver project and then access it through a separate ftp application and change each page manually. This is a tedious process and would have to be repeated whenever your site was re-published.
I knew there had to be a better, easier way to do this. I started poking around inside the Rapidweaver files and made a discovery. There is a way to add the Bannerzest code on a page by page basis. This means you can add different banners to different pages or have banners on some pages and not on others.
I cannot type the name of these tags in their entirety or they will not display properly in the web page. So, I will use the format user_header (in blue text) to indicate these. These should have a percent sign before and after them but, as I stated, they will not display properly on this web page if I type them that way. So when you see user_header in blue, it refers to the entire tag, including the percent signs before and after. These tags serve only one purpose. They take information you place in the Page Inspector > Header > Header window and place it in your index.html file at the location of the specific attribute tag. (See picture at left)
So here’s the technique: In the index.html file, you are going to move the user_header tag to the location where you would normally place the Bannerzest code. This varies from theme to theme so you’ll still want to refer to instructions located on the “Your Theme” page. Instead of inserting the Bannerzest code directly, place the user_header tag in that location. DO NOT COPY AND PASTE…. USE CUT AND PASTE. You do not want to have a user_header tag in more than one location in your document!
Once you have relocated the user_header tag, save the index.html document. Now, for each page of your project, in the Page Inspector > Header > Header field, paste in the Bannerzest code youd like displayed for that particular page. The newly-relocated user_header tag will insert that code in the right place for your page. BRILLIANT!!!
If you do not paste any Bannerzest code in that field, the page will just act like a normal page.
If you've used the normal version of this modification earlier and now want to incorporate the new technique, just go back into your index.html document, get rid of the Bannerzest code (save it, you'll need it) and cut the user_header tag out and paste it exactly where the Bannerzest code was. Now you'll need to paste the bannerzest code (I told you to save it) into the Page Inspector. You'll need to paste some Bannerzest code into the Page Inspector for each page you want to have the banner in the header.
Once you start using more than one bannerzest banner on your site, it could start getting confusing. Save your files with good names so you can find them easily and so they don't get confused.!!
As with all the modifications on this site, I want FEEDBACK. Let me know what works and what doesn’t work and what problems you encounter. Also, send me links to your sites so I can include them on the showcase page.
If you want to see a demo site that was created using this technique.... lots of Bannerzest banners on lots of pages.... see here.
