Saturday 21 August 2010 8:24:31 am
Hi I'm working on the second site that contains a layout datatype already, and I still dont get it. I dont get why its usefull. and I dont get how to use it properly. Any tips are welcome. It could also be I missed very important documentation (i feel as if i did - but really, i couldnt find much). Both these sites had a custom layout, made by a designer. When the user goes to the backend, f.e. to change a 'featured' node on the homepage, the first thing they see is "change layout". They should never change the layout, because the template code would break, because of missing zones. So we'll have to tell them "dont touch that button". Is there any way we can disable / hide the option ? It would already help if we could say some layouts are only available for certain nodes (not classes, but node_id's), so we can limit their options to just one design for a certain page (would still look strange though. imho, changing the layout is not something that should be in a content management system at all, because its not about managing content, but ok). The second thing they see is "name" [textfield] and then "add block". The user will think this is what he wants - add something - so we'll have to tell them never to click there either - "you see, a block is part of a zone in a layout and contains nodes." :-) hm .. can we move that option down to the bottom ? which templates would need to be changed for that ? Actually, more often than not we dont want them to be able to add, delete or move blocks in a zone at all. The blocks are exactly where they are because of the design of the layout. We only want them to manage a block's content. Is there a way to disable add/deleting/moving/renaming blocks for certain users ? Can we manage that through roles & permissions ? Would the interface gracefully adapt to such settings ? In some other cases however, we would like them to be able to change the type of the block, for example from "most recent events" to "most reviewed events" or whatever. So the limitations requested above should only apply to certain blocks (so its probably not in roles and permissions but in the block.ini. I havent seen such options). Obviously, users should only be allowed to use certain types of blocks in certain zones. I just found out that can be done, but only through a hack. Is that correct ? And now for the big "why?". If you have a custom layout, not designed to be so superflexible that it can contain 'every type of block' in 'every type of layout', why would you use ezflow - and teach your clients 'how not to break your homepage' ? There seem to be two things we'd miss out on: 1 - the nice manual interaction with a block - adding and removing nodes, mainly. ezobjectrelationbrowse would be another way to do that, but not rotation, timing and such. yet. 2 - cool ezflow blocktypes without interaction (like "twitterblock") - is there a standard way to use such blocktypes yourself in templates, without having a node with a layout around ? or perhaps I could use a secret 'shadow' node to keep the ezflow goodies in, which only superadmins may edit ? Is anyone doing that ? all confused, *-pike
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The class eZContentObjectTreeNode does.
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