12.3. A more interesting page footer

You can put a contact email address at the bottom of each page in case your customers want to contact you. You could just add it to the footer, but by putting it into a variable you can use it in contact pages as well. This allows you to easily change the variable information and have that change reflected in all instances of that variable. The following is an example of how to set a catalog variable in catalog.cfg:

  Variable CONTACT_EMAIL someone@your.domain

Now make the following change to your template file bottom:

  </td>
  </tr>
- <tr><td colspan=2>(bottom)</td></tr>
+ <tr><td colspan=2><a href="mailto:__CONTACT_EMAIL__">Contact us</a>
+ if you have any questions.</td></tr>
  </table>
  </div>
  </body>
  </html>

Be sure to restart Interchange before reloading the page in your browser, since you made a change to catalog.cfg.

Let's add another variable to your catalog. This variable demonstrates how an Interchange tag can be included in the variable. This Interchange tag returns the current date in a standard format. Add the following to catalog.cfg:

  Variable DISPLAYDATE [time]%A, %B %d, %Y[/time]

---

Note: See the Interchange Tag Reference Guide for an explanation of the [time] tag.

---

Now add the following to the left template piece:

  <tr>
- <td align=center>(left)</td>
+ <td align=center>__DISPLAYDATE__</td>
  <td align=center>

Restart Interchange and view the page.