I had a really long and unproductive day today trying somehow to grasp Freeway Pro 6’s master pages. A simple 7-page inline-built site in which each page shared the same basic layout structure and a navigation menu.
I wanted structural items like inline divs to inherit their widths and heights from their Master items so in instance pages I had checked Use Master Settings and unchecked Use Master Content. In the case of the navigation menu, I checked both.
But every time I made a change to the menu (a CSS styled unordered list) weird things would happen - even to things that had nothing to do with the menu. Some items that were set to Use Master Settings would lose their id names - they would go from id names like #footer to #item1. If I selected each affected item I could re-check the Use Master Settings box and the name would revert. But doing that several times a page, on every page, every time I made a minor change that was NOT to any of those items really wore me down.
Some items that had the Use Master Settings re-applied would not keep checked, even though they took on the master item settings.
In another thread, I expressed some disappointment with another aspect of master pages - the addition of a class to identify instance items that are different from their master items… the f-ms class. While I’m still not very happy about this approach, I am trying to get my head around it enough to find better ways to work to avoid problems with it. An example of such a problem, as I found today while trying to get a small bit of custom CSS to work, is that it sets up challenges to using the Cascade Order. Style code written like #myitem.f-ms will always over-ride #myitem - preventing you from remotely targeting an item by id. To overcome this I ended up doubling up my custom style definitions to cover the possible ways Pro6 might write its code - so #myitem, #myitem.f-ms. More work, more complex, less predictable, less elegant.
Then at one point, fighting with the Master pages caused the id’s of several page items to completely disappear! Gone! To a better place, I hope.
Finally I gave up. I didn’t really use Master Pages in previous Freeway Pro versions - and that may end up being the case again. But if there’s a chance they would work, I hope Softpress will step up with some instructions or tutorials. I’d do it, but this is the first time I’ve ever even seen this application.
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