This is a bit of a funny question - but has anyone used Freeway to design layouts and designs NOT for web page layouts in themselves but to put into CMS pages?
Example: I have a series of clickable maps to make - in the ‘old days’ I would have sliced up the graphics and put these into tables. In this way I could place the table-based designs inside either conventional web pages or into CMS via their HTML entry fields.
These days everyone wants pure CSS designs where possible - so would it be possible to design my graphic designs in Freeway and then strip out the
areas and place them into the CMS?
Anyone done anything like this or has comments about doing this or advice?
Sorry if I made this sound more complecated than it is.
I use Freeway to generate page fragments (partials, in Rails slang) in
conjunction with my TemplateHelper Action. The Action gives me the
control over the result so that I can remove the dimensions,
positioning code, ID, etc. as well as wrap the resulting snippet with
any code “book-ends” that it might need in order to work in the layout.
There are a few gotchas waiting to snare you if you do this, though:
You must use External Stylesheets, or all your text will look funny.
You must add a base tag to your outer shell, or the images will be
missing.
You must use Single Resources Folder or some of the images may be
missing.
You can’t use the normal Rollover effects etc., you have to use the
split versions available at ActionsForge. Apply the library code to
your outer shell, and then use the companion trigger Actions within
your partials.
This presumes that you will use Freeway to generate the outermost
shell into which these page fragments are inserted. If you don’t do
this, then you can still use this technique, but you will also need to
add the Remote Resources Action to re-target images and other
resources within your generated code.
Walter
On Dec 1, 2009, at 6:01 AM, Steve Beat wrote:
This is a bit of a funny question - but has anyone used Freeway to
design layouts and designs NOT for web page layouts in themselves
but to put into CMS pages?
Example: I have a series of clickable maps to make - in the ‘old
days’ I would have sliced up the graphics and put these into tables.
In this way I could place the table-based designs inside either
conventional web pages or into CMS via their HTML entry fields.
These days everyone wants pure CSS designs where possible - so would
it be possible to design my graphic designs in Freeway and then
strip out the
areas and place them into the CMS?
Anyone done anything like this or has comments about doing this or
advice?
Sorry if I made this sound more complecated than it is.
It’d depend on what CMS you were using. I use embedded template’s in ExpressionEngine (which didn’t launch 2.0 on the Dec. 1st) and that’s basically taking a code snippet and embedding it inside a template in the CMS and then I’d call that template within a template to load that snippet using the tag system. I used Walt’s TemplateHelper action for a while, but eventually I just cut the samples out of FW and did one or two things in TextMate and then it worked. You wouldn’t want to over do it as it would take a toll on the database, but if it was repeated content and what not then I see a real benefit.
So the short version is, I’ve been there done that.