Arylia Template Usage Overview
Arylia will build your galleries for you. That means it will retrieve content, prune if necessary, thumbnail appropriately, add banners, link to the correct sponsor, and all the rest of those boring tasks you hate repeating. But it won't design your galleries. You still have to do that. And once you've done it, you must place certain "identifiers" on the page so that Arylia will understand what you want it to do.
Creating a Template
Most likely, you already have your first template almost finished, even if you don't realize it. If you've built a gallery before (probably by hand), you can use that gallery to create your template. If not, just design a gallery, in whatever version of HTML or XHTML that you're most comfortable. You don't have to add the images now if you don't want to, though doing so will help you better visualize what your galleries will look like.
Once you've done that, you just have to decide what type of template you want to use.
Basic template (images only)
This is the original type of Arylia template. It accepts a single identifier that represents all of your images. The principal advantage of this template type is that it can accept a variable number of images, and it will simply expand to accommodate whatever number of images it is given. It can also display all of the images in a single column, linked to the sponsor.
To create this type of template, take the page you designed, and replace the entire block of thumbnails with the text __THUMBNAILS__ - this text with double underscores on each side is what we call an "identifier".
Advanced template
This template type is much more powerful, but requires more work on your part. In an advanced template you specify the location and exact size of each individual thumbnail or embedded video. Instead of the __THUMBNAILS__ identifier, you can use any or all of the following identifiers:
__THUMB.W.H__ : An image thumbnail, which links to a full-size image. The width of the thumbnail is "W" and the height is "H". For example, for a 150x200 thumbnail, you would use the identifier: __THUMB.150.200__
__VTHUMB__ : A video thumbnail, which links to a video. It's not so much of a "thumbnail", though, because this identifier indicates that Arylia should use the original still image in its original dimensions.
__VTHUMB.W.H__ : A video thumbnail, which links to a video. The width of the thumbnail is "W" and the height is "H". For example, for a 480x270 video thumbnail, you would use the identifier: __THUMB.480.270__
__EMBED__ : A video embedded directly on the page, in the video's actual dimensions. These dimensions can be modified by Arylia if you have ffmpeg installed and properly configured.
__EMBED.W.H__ : A video embedded directly on the page. The width of the embedded video is "W" and the height is "H". For example, for a 640x480 video you would use the identifier: __EMBED.640.480__
Important Arylia Template Notes
If you are using thumbnails to link to your content, and you want that content to be displayed on its own separate media template, you can create that template and associate it by naming it a particular way. For a full-size image template, you should insert -image in the template filename before .php, and for an embedded video template you should insert -video in the template filename before .php.
For example, if your template is called mytemplate.php, a full-size image template would be called mytemplate-image.php and an embedded video template would be called mytemplate-video.php. Arylia will automatically detect and parse these templates and use them if they are present.