Collections Publishing

Displaying collections is closely tied to the way the SkyBlueCanvas template concept works. In order to fully explain Collection Publishing, we must cover a little bit of the concept of how SkyBlueCanvas templates work.

When you create a template for your SkyBlueCanvas site, you build the HTML exactly as you normally would. However, in any area of the page where editable content is to appear, you add a Content Replacement Token that indicates to SkyBlueCanvas that content goes in this region. The token names are up to you, but they must follow the format {region:your_region_name}.

When your page is viewed on the public site, SkyBlueCanvas finds all of the tokens on the page, then replaces them with the Collection you indicated goes in that region. Which brings us to our current topic. Collections Publishing is where you tell SkyBlueCanvas what to put in a particular region.

Diagram 10

Diagram 10 shows the list view of all the collections available to publish on your site. To publish a collection, click the Edit control indicated in Diagram 10-B. You will be re-directed to the Collections Publishing editor for that collection.

Diagram 11

Diagram 11-A

Briefly, let’s familiarize ourselves with the diagram to facilitate our discussion. Diagram 11-A shows a thumbnail of a typical web page layout. Your layout(s) may vary from this diagram, but this is a good guide since most web pages use some variation of this basic structure.

Diagram 11-B

Diagram 11-B shows the name of the pages currently in your site and a Show? selector. The Show selector allows you to turn on or off the display of a collection on a page-by-page basis.

Diagram 11-C

Diagram 11-C shows the selector you use to indicate which region in which to display the collection. Remember that we said you define the regions in your HTML template using the {region:your_region_name} token format. When you open the Collections Publishing editor, SkyBlueCanvas parses the layout template selected for the page next to which the selector in Diagram 11-C appears and shows you those regions in the selector list.

So, if you indicated the the Home Page uses a layout named standard and the standard layout defines {region:top}, {region:left}, {region:main} and {region:right} tokens, then the selector shown in Diagram 11-C will show:

• Top
• Left
• Main
• Right
• Footer

as its list of options. The arrows pointing from the layout thumbnail to the selector in Diagram 11-C demonstrate how the layout of the page, and the region options are related.

We are using the Links collection for our current example, so whatever region you indicate using the selector in Diagram 11-C is where your list of links will appear on each page. And since you assign the position on a page-by-page basis, you can show the list of links in different locations depending on each page and the layout used for that page.

Diagram 11-D

Diagram 11-D indicates the Publish selector. The Collections Publishing editor requires that you set two settings in order to display a collection. At first this may seem redundant, but it is actually quite useful because you can unpublish a collection globally using the selector in Diagram 11-D or on a page-by-page basis using the selector for each page shown in Diagram 11-B.

Diagram 11-E

Once you are finished making your publishing selctions, click the Save button shown in Diagram 11-E to save your selections. Now, when a visitor visits your web site, they will see (or not see as the case may be) your collection in the regions you indicated on each page.