How to define the layout of a master or parent page?
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Hey there, nice forum you have here.
I decided it was time I moved from a HTML site with hundreds of pages to some CMS, after some opinions I chose Concrete 5. Glad for the effort building this.
I've just applied the left sidebar page of one theme, that will be used for almost the entire site. I've also changed the layout of this page, and added some blocks that will be coomon to the site, like Nav Bar and Search Form for example.
My first question and main difficulty, is this: How do I make something like "Save As" so the blocks I added appear on the new pages?
Better yet, how to define a Parent page or Master page, whatever you want to call it?
I guess it would be stupid to format each page and add 4 or 5 blocks for each page, not to mention it would be almost impossible to keep a similar layout.
On Dashboard > Pages and Themes > Page Types, you just can choose Left Sidebar, Full, and so on...
Am I missing something really obvious?
I decided it was time I moved from a HTML site with hundreds of pages to some CMS, after some opinions I chose Concrete 5. Glad for the effort building this.
I've just applied the left sidebar page of one theme, that will be used for almost the entire site. I've also changed the layout of this page, and added some blocks that will be coomon to the site, like Nav Bar and Search Form for example.
My first question and main difficulty, is this: How do I make something like "Save As" so the blocks I added appear on the new pages?
Better yet, how to define a Parent page or Master page, whatever you want to call it?
I guess it would be stupid to format each page and add 4 or 5 blocks for each page, not to mention it would be almost impossible to keep a similar layout.
On Dashboard > Pages and Themes > Page Types, you just can choose Left Sidebar, Full, and so on...
Am I missing something really obvious?
Hi Andy, thanks a lot, it worked out. Blocks now appear on every page with that Left Side Bar layout.
Hope you can help me on this one: when editing a single (child) page I can click on one of the frames, do Add a Block and also to Add Layout. When editing the "Parent" page, this option doesn't appear.
Any reason for that? Or what am I doing wrong?
(I need to change a place where I can only have 1 block, to a frame where I can have three blocks.)
Hope you can help me on this one: when editing a single (child) page I can click on one of the frames, do Add a Block and also to Add Layout. When editing the "Parent" page, this option doesn't appear.
Any reason for that? Or what am I doing wrong?
(I need to change a place where I can only have 1 block, to a frame where I can have three blocks.)
You're not missing anything -- there's a limitation in the current system where you cannot add Layouts to the Page Defaults (and I don't think it's going to be changed soon because it's a challenging technical issue due to the underlying architecture).
Setting up these global areas (like sidebars) is really the one gaping whole in C5's otherwise excellent balance of simplicity and flexibility for content editing (IMHO).
I've asked the core team about this several times too, and they never seem to think it's an important problem -- I guess they never built sites where they had the need for this (which I think is strange because a lot of the sites I build do).
What kinds of blocks are you placing in the sidebar? If it's just Content and Images and fairly "static" things like that, you might want to try using this "global areas" thing I made a while back:
http://www.concrete5.org/community/forums/usage/a-new-approach-to-a...
But note that it has a serious limitation in that sometimes the Autonav block doesn't work properly in it (if you're trying to show "pages under current" -- it shows pages under the original template page, not pages under the currently-viewed page). Also the form block doesn't work in it either.
-Jordan
Setting up these global areas (like sidebars) is really the one gaping whole in C5's otherwise excellent balance of simplicity and flexibility for content editing (IMHO).
I've asked the core team about this several times too, and they never seem to think it's an important problem -- I guess they never built sites where they had the need for this (which I think is strange because a lot of the sites I build do).
What kinds of blocks are you placing in the sidebar? If it's just Content and Images and fairly "static" things like that, you might want to try using this "global areas" thing I made a while back:
http://www.concrete5.org/community/forums/usage/a-new-approach-to-a...
But note that it has a serious limitation in that sometimes the Autonav block doesn't work properly in it (if you're trying to show "pages under current" -- it shows pages under the original template page, not pages under the currently-viewed page). Also the form block doesn't work in it either.
-Jordan
Hi Jordan, thanks for your reply.
Well, although the work you have done there seems to be quite usefull, and I will probably use it in the future, I don't think it's needed in my particular situation, also because I'm not up to that level - yet! :D
I have a single top bar with an auto-nav in text, wich I don't want since there's a large auto-nav bar on the left. So all I want in the thin top bar is: on the left side, 3 simple direct links: e-mail link, "home", and a "contacts" link, since it's what most users need. On the right side I'll add the "Add This" small bar.
Since I've already wrote the HTML for the simple links, I guess I'll just add a simple 3 column table and put the "Add This" code on the right side. Apllying this to Child Pages should work for now.
Well, although the work you have done there seems to be quite usefull, and I will probably use it in the future, I don't think it's needed in my particular situation, also because I'm not up to that level - yet! :D
I have a single top bar with an auto-nav in text, wich I don't want since there's a large auto-nav bar on the left. So all I want in the thin top bar is: on the left side, 3 simple direct links: e-mail link, "home", and a "contacts" link, since it's what most users need. On the right side I'll add the "Add This" small bar.
Since I've already wrote the HTML for the simple links, I guess I'll just add a simple 3 column table and put the "Add This" code on the right side. Apllying this to Child Pages should work for now.
No worries. It almost sounds like you could just hard-code that top navbar html into your theme's page type templates -- they would show up on every page and users wouldn't be able to change them at all (which may or may not be a good thing, depending on how the site is to be used). If you have a few pages where you don't want it to appear, you could just create an additional page type template without the html in it and have users choose between the two (or if you want to get more advanced you could create a custom attribute that they could choose in the "Properties" dialog, and use that to conditionally output the top nav or not -- but this is a bit more advanced as well).
welcome to the forums. It is very easy to miss the pages defaults and how to set them per block (1st question I asked on the forums).
Your master for each page is the default - it is available on the pages types page by clicking the 'Defaults' button.
Add your blobks to the various areas in there.
Once you have added a block, you click on it again and in the resulting menu is the item 'Setup on child pages'.
Use this to add it to any or all pages of that page type...