THL Toolbox > Developers' Zone > Web Development > THL Essays in Cocoon > Hooking up an Essay to a THL Page
Hooking up an Essay to a THL Page
Importing an Essay into an Existing THL Page Using the Hash
An essay can be included within any THL page by simply adding a hash beginning with “#essay=…” This will invoke the JavaScript that performs the AJAX call to Cocoon to render the XML into HTML and deliver that within the content section of the calling THL page. A standard example of this would be the Introduction to Sera essay by José Cabezón which has the URL:
http://www.thlib.org/places/monasteries/sera/essays/#essay=/cabezon/sera/intro/
Note that the same essay can be shown anywhere on THL by simply changing the page URL before the hash (#) so that to display it on the THL homepage one would use:
http://www.thlib.org/#essay=/cabezon/sera/intro/
Whenever an essay is imported into a page, its table of contents is inserted at the top of the side-column unless the <text> element of the essay’s XML has a rend attribute set to “no-toc”
Creating A PHP THL Page That Automatically Inserts Essay Content
The general format of a THL PHP page is to have a <div> whose id is "content" containing a <div> with a class of "shell-1". The main content of the page is generally within this "shell-1" class <div>. To get a page to automatically import the text of an essay, do the following:
- Add a class "essaybody" to the <div class="shell-1">
- Within that shell-1 <div> insert a single <a> element with:
- its href attribute set to the cocoon path to the essay (that is, everything after the "#essay=" in the full URL)
- a class attribute set to "essay"
An example of this is the license page in THL Tools, which automatically includes the THL Text License when called. The code in this page looks as follows:
<!-- begin content -->
 <div id="content">
   <div class="shell-1 essaybody">
     <a href="/thl/text-license/" class="essay" ></a>
   </div>
 </div>
 <!-- end content -->