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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

6 years ago

Where would you see this being declared?
Simon Clay

Simon Clay 127 points

6 years ago

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/
Jonathan Clift

Jonathan Clift 1 points

6 years ago

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.
Jonathan Clift

Jonathan Clift 1 points

6 years ago

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!
Robert Ketter

Robert Ketter 103 points

6 years ago

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.
Scott Gruber

Scott Gruber 0 points

6 years ago

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.