I done goofed!

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I don't use Sidebar templates very much, so for some reason I got confused and rather than calling my main area "Main," I called it "Left" and the right sidebar "Right." I didn't foresee any problems about this, but as it turns out I am using the Calendar page which has and Events Page template with 'Main' and the Blog has a template with 'Main.' So, rather than write a bunch of extra CSS to style these templates to look like my other Right Sidebar pages, I would like to change my Right Sidebar template's Left Editable region to "Main." It's more semantically correct, anyway.

Problem is, of course, when I change it on the template, my content in the Left region disappears on all those pages I've already created with the Right Sidebar template. Is there an easy way to fix this without recreating the pages with a new Sidebar template? Since most of my pages are Sidebar templates at this point, it might make more sense to swap out the 'Main' in my default, view, events and blog_entry templates instead... but, then I don't know if I will be breaking the Calendar and the Blog since they might have some hard-to-find PHP that spits out stuff to the 'Main' area.

 
JohntheFish replied on at Permalink Best Answer Reply
JohntheFish
It may be a fair bit of work, but stick to Main and Sidebar. Not just for compatibility with existing addons, but so you can swap to a default theme and back (useful for diagnosing problems and when upgrading).

To get there from where you are

1. Take a backup of the database and all files.

2. Check your backup.

At this stage you could modify the theme and then hack the mySQL tables with phpMyAdmin. It all depends on how confident you are with it.

If you want to do it purely within C5, I suggest a 3-stage process:

3. Modify your theme to add the correctly named areas above your faulty areas (Main above Left, Sidebar above Right)

4. In C5 edit each page and move blocks up from the old area names to the new area names.

5. Modify your theme again to remove the unwanted incorrect (and now empty) area names.
zoinks replied on at Permalink Reply
Thank you, the latter is an awesome solution for me. I wish I knew phpMyAdmin better; can't risk that.

Main and Sidebar. Got it. Making a note of it. Thanks and I'm marking this green.
JohntheFish replied on at Permalink Reply
JohntheFish
Be sure to get the capitalisation right 'Main' and 'Sidebar' - area names are case sensitive and you won't want to go through this twice :-)
zoinks replied on at Permalink Reply
Good looking out, thank you. That thought just occurred to me as I was halfway through it. Fortunately, I DID capitalize each word.