Recipes and Best Practices

Defining templates for pages having a common structure

Pages of your sites can be divided into groups having the same structure, for ex.:

  • Standard pages with content
  • Pages of departments on the corporate site
  • News
  • Blog posts
  • Pages describing products or services
  • …

Any group of pages may have its own template containing shared markup and common attributes for all pages in the group Note: templates are to be created in the assemblies manager UI. In this case, the creation of a standard page in the group comes down to the choosing of available template and filling the required attributes using pages manager UI for a particular page instance.

What do we do if we need a page having free structure? For example, it can be a lending page, or advertising pages with unique structure. There is no need to define a separate template for each page. We can define a basic template for all suchlike pages, where we have:

  • attributes with a core type (page markup) allow us to set an individual page markup.
  • optional - attributes with a fileref used to set additional css stylesheets.

After that we can change a page markup/css styles directly for a single page instance in the pages manager.

Define only page attributes that can be really changed during a page lifetime

There is no need to setup a separate editable attribute for every text block on a page, because, there is a chance that such blocks will never be changed by a site editor during a page lifetime.

Example: We add the wiki attribute with the name copyright containing one single line:

All rights reserved

This line would never be changed individually for a single page, it would only be changed for all of a site’s pages. Therefore the best way is to set it directly in the template, so instead of:

<footer>
    ${asm('copyright')}
</footer>

You may write this line directly in the template part shared by all site pages:

<footer>
    All rights reserved
</footer>

There are many other cases where it is not necessary to move all page data parts into editable page attributes. The decision to define a page data part as an attribute should be guided by the frequency of this data part changes during a page lifetime. Also consider a visual page editor to modify a number of text blocks within a page.