Here’s what I’m thinking…
My own home-grown “backdraft”???
Over the years I’ve turned Caleb’s backdraft into my own “template” of sorts. I have made a few modifications that make sense to me and I use my “customized backdraft” as my starting point. I’m thinking of trying to pull apart the code in that and use it to build snippets / building blocks to construct my site. Scaffolding is a good word for it. Caleb, am I making too big of an assumption that you would be okay with this???
Between Caleb and Thomas, the concept of “modules” makes sense to me and I’m thinking I could make Coda work in a way that would also make sense to me. I’ve also grown accustomed to using FW master pages in the less traditional sense and more as “modular-holders” for future content.
Picking things apart is a great way to learn. I recommend you dismantle anything that catches your interest.
Master Pages in the FreeWay sense
Am I correct in assuming that hand-coded sites don’t have a "make a change on this page and it changes automatically on other linked pages”?
Strictly speaking, no. Or not that I’ve seen. Of course you’re also talking about “static” sites. That said, when you start working with dynamic sites the answer changes.
In either case, because you’re working with text you can do some very elaborate (or simple) find and replace very quickly.
Site Organization
I’m not talking CMS yet. I want a system that has the ability to add that when the time comes, but what I mean is I’m trying to wrap my head around the site structure in a text document. This is probably something that I will have to play with to begin to get a feel for. But for example, if I had a site with a home page, an about page and a contact page— would all those pages live in one “Coda” document? Is there any site management built in, or do I take care to maintain all these separate files (much like FW’s own ‘Site Folder’) on my own?
There is no such thing as a “Coda document”. When you add a site to Coda all you’re doing is telling Coda to “watch this folder and all its files”. Coda simply mirrors the folder/file structure in its “Files” sidebar. Not unlike what you see in Transmit or Finder. Coda does not impose itself on how you choose to organize things.
Closing Thoughts
I know Coda is not the be-all-end-all. I tried many of the other editors through the years and Coda is the one that made the most sense to me. I’d still love to find a replacement WYSIWYG builder, but I’m thinking it might not exist. If I have to abandon FW, I want the end result to be better than what I have now and not a step backwards.
It’s a matter of learning the best way to accomplish a specific task. Once you understand the rules you can then make informed decisions as to when to bend those rules and when it’s appropriate to break them. No tool can teach you those things. But what that knowledge affords you is the ability to recognize when your tool(s) are doing things you don’t want them to.
Todd
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