Discussion Forum

asiral

Member

Registered: May 18, 2013

Posts: 43

Flexible Content Layout in Templates

Our templates are a little less fixed in concept in that they are really just layouts -- different proportions of a 16 column grid such as 10/6, 10/3/3, full-width, etc.  While callouts allow us to syndicate module content as outlined in the documentation, this doesn't really work for unique content, e.g. the main body content of a page.

On the same token, a fixed set of fields does not really meet our needs for main body content.  For example, we could want the main body content to be rich-text, then a photo gallery, then some more rich text followed by maybe a "module" such as maybe an accordion, etc. (again, this is just an example).  Not only does this require ordering of content "partials/modules/components", but it requires us to be able to choose which "module/component" type of content to be able to insert into the main body content dynamically and not be limited by a few pre-determined set of fields for a template.

I understand this is a significant technical change in concept from how templates work, so do you have any suggestions on the best approach--if this is really just something that isn't practically feasible within BigTree or even if there is a hacky approach?

asiral

Member

Registered: May 18, 2013

Posts: 43

Re: Flexible Content Layout in Templates

And it's also worth adding that generating the entire page with callouts that reference module tables isn't completely practical.  While we can select the column a callout should appear in, maintaining all content through modules, especially when unique and only meant for one page, can get unwieldy when we have a few hundred pages on our sites.

timbuckingham

Administrator

From: Baltimore, MD

Registered: April 2, 2012

Posts: 974

Re: Flexible Content Layout in Templates

We're actually working on a few sites right now that are somewhat similar. We actually split out the callout system into three separate entities (left side, right side, and content blocks) but it's not the best for upgrade-ability since you have to throw custom overrides in.

If you just need content blocks you can always create what we usually refer to as a "Flexible Callout" that's just an HTML area. It doesn't make the editing interface as nice for the end users since you're editing in a pop-up window instead of the nice wide area but it will let you throw a content block, then a photo gallery callout, another content block, etc.

When we do sites with a unified callout system instead of breaking them out we sometimes have a field for "Gravity" in the content block callouts that lets the user determine which column to put the callout in when we draw them on the front end.