FEATURE – Templates

Just FYI I discovered hy it uses an include not the function. widget-content-listing.php used some variables set in the widget setting that are not globalised so are not available when the template is called via teh function.

Not 100% of the way out of that.

Order was the main thing. I achieved reordering through relative / absolute positioning, which is working fine for me, but for some reason I’m not keen on using CSS to do that sort of thing, don’t know why, so my first instinct was to look at customising templates.

One approach to take is rather than have a list of specific arguments coming out of the widget / shortcode e.g. $d_price, $d_beds have one single array argument ($args) that is passed through to the templating system, similar to the way WordPress does with many functions e.g.
$args=array(‘d_price’=>’on’,’d_beds’=>’off’);
get_template(‘template’,$args)

even allows for structuring arrays if you like
e.g. get_template(array(‘display’=>array(‘beds’=>’on’,’excerpt’=>on), ‘images’=>array(‘h’=>123, ‘w’=>123))

The template can extract $args into variables (simpler to follow) or use them as their array elements as required