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Thread tagged as: Suggestions

Suggestion - Region template guidance

One thing a lot of my clients get confused about is when they create a page themselves. They never seem to be able to work out which templates they should select for each region.

One thing I think might help would be the ability to add a snippet of guidance associated with each content template. I've attached a screenshot of what I'm referring too.

I'm not a huge fan of adding extra 'guidance' as most people just won't read it. But I do think some simple guidance like this can help clarify exactly what functionality a template will provide and make it a little easier to create a page from scratch. I find it quite hard to explain what a template is with just the name.

Region template guidance

Jonathan Clift

Jonathan Clift 1 points

  • 6 years ago
Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

Where would you see this being declared?

Simon Clay

Simon Clay 127 points

Don't forget you can use 'Perch Content Create' to automatically select the templates that should be used: https://docs.grabaperch.com/docs/developers/creating-regions/

Drew McLellan said:

Where would you see this being declared?

Hmmm I guess some kind of perch tag like:


<perch:guidance id="template_guidance" > To use this template you need to do xyz... </perch:guidance>

Not sure if that's actually feasible but hopefully that outlines my thinking.

Simon Clay said:

Don't forget you can use 'Perch Content Create' to automatically select the templates that should be used: https://docs.grabaperch.com/docs/developers/creating-regions/

This isn't something I've really used yet as I've always had to keep things quite flexible for clients. I can see this being very useful though and will certainly be able to use it for the project I'm on at the moment.

Thanks for the heads up/reminder!

I often use perch_content_create() on pages where a client might delete a region. This way it will recreate the region and set it back up correctly the next time the client visits the page.

There is a perch:help tag available you may want to try. It would appear in a template though and I think you meant instructions showing up before it is selected.

perch:help A block of HTML help information displayed to the user adding content to the template.