Templates, pages & content

Alison Pallister asked on September 9, 2015 03:00

I'm a very new user of Kentico and I am having trouble with templates and pages. My understanding is that templates provide the structure, design and core function and you can create pages based on the templates and enter different content for different pages. The problem I am having is that I choose a standard template eg 2 columns and I enter a text region and an image region. I create a couple of pages based on this template and enter some content. Problem is the content is mirrored in all the pages and the template itself! I don't understand why content from a page should save back to the template? I discovered that if I enter an editable text webpart, rather than static, I can enter different text on different pages. But the same doesn't work for images, if I select editable image, then any image I upload to one page is reflected in all the others including the template. There must be an easy way to do this, otherwise your content editors would be stuffed up all the templates and pages! Surely I don't have to make one template for every page on the site?

Correct Answer

Brenden Kehren answered on September 9, 2015 04:42

Alison, your simplistic approach is a good start. You are also correct when you say the page content and the template should be separate. Essentially you have a layout, template, webpart zones, webparts, page types and documents. You create a layout with webpart zones and use that in your template. Inside your template, you add webparts and/or widgets to your template in the zones you created in the layout.

In the webparts you can then define content you want to display. For example a list of News items. Say you have a page in your content tree /News. Under the /News page you have 10 news items (each is a News Page Type). On your /News page you define the page template and add a repeater and define the page types you want to display, how they display, if you want them to be paged, etc. Now all your content editors do is add new news items in a form, vs in an editable text area. Using Page Types also allows you to utilize the content in other places on the site and possibly other sites within the same Kentico instance.

Kentico is build around using custom Page Types. You can create these page types in the UI very easy and give your content editors a simple form to enter data in. Then in transformations, you display that data in the format that has been dictated by a designer and implemented by a developer (or savvy content editor). Page types are linked with documents meaning they will have page relevant information (url, meta data, etc.) with them.

Hopefully this helps out a little, if not, look me up and I'd be glad to help out.

Brenden

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Alison Pallister answered on September 9, 2015 06:39

Thanks so much for the tip on Page Types. The problems I was having this morning don't appear to be happening this afternoon. Perhaps there is something buggy in my deployment. Anyway, I'll work it all out eventually :) Thanks so much for the offer of additional help :) I'll be sure to look you up if I get really stuck!

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