Page Defaults problem : New pages are treated as an "alias" and being "disconnected" from the Page Default

Permalink 1 user found helpful May 06, 2012 at 1:04 PM

I have some blocks set up on Page Defaults (for the Blog Entry page type). When I create a new page with this page type, I see a warning message "This block is an alias of Page Defaults. Editing it here will 'disconnect' it so changes to Page Defaults will no longer affect this block." (screenshot attached)

What is this about?

What is the proper way to set up / use blocks on Page Defaults so that when creating a new page it includes those blocks which can then be edited?

Or, is there a better way to approach this?

I would actually prefer to hard-code default sample block areas in the theme templates, so they are simply part of the theme and I don't have to go in and monkey with the Page Defaults after installing the theme. (Also because there seem to be a lot of issues when changing the defaults later and re-applying them to existing pages...) But I'm not sure how to this...

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

thanks,

dustin

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triplei replied on May 6, 2012 at 1:44 pm Permalink Reply

The idea of page defaults is so that you can drop in some blocks on newly created pages as a base to work from. Then any changes made to one of those blocks will then make it unique for the page you are on.

It sounds like you are wanting the functionality of a stack. Try adding a stack to an area on the page defaults and then adding some blocks to the stack. In the future, if you update the stack, it will update all instances of it throughout the site.

From what I understand from your post, this is the functionality you're looking for.

A second option if you are comfortable playing around with the theme's files would be to use a GlobalArea. Any other page types which use the same named global area will have the same content added to it.

I hope either of these options help out.