Custom Headers and Footers

The best way to integrate Connect Daily into a web site 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 web site.

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

When a calendar is displayed, the following takes place

1. The system checks for a custom header or footer file specified for the specific calendar. If no header or footer is specified at the calendar level, then the software checks the system configuration to see if global default header 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 ships with sample Custom Header and Footer files in the custom/en sub-directory.

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/.