How to open individual pages

Using BLOCS 2.3.2

The site that I need to build would contain a 1000+ pages. In the version of the software that I have the only way to access individual pages is to scroll through all the pages by clicking the button on the top right - then I have to scroll down to the page I would like to open. Obviously scanning through a 1000+ pages to find the page I need to open and work on is a very tedious process. Is there an easier way to open individual pages? Thanks for your help!

Upgrade to Blocs 3 to use the search feature in the new left side pages pane.

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@stevew I wouldn’t even consider building a 1000+ page site in Blocs 2. That’s a mammoth task in any design app, but the time savings using Blocs 3 would be massive, due to the improvements in interface, general stability and features.

It would take a few days adapting to the new workflow, but overall it would save you weeks or even months on a site that size. Without knowing anything specific about the project that does sound like a job for a CMS though and there are a few options with Blocs.

For some reason, websites just seem to look better in Blocs 3 as well, so I’ve been slowly converting some. In theory you can migrate existing sites to Blocs 3, however I see better results when starting from scratch.

Is there some way to adjust the sorting of the pages? Can I not tell the pages to sort alphabetically instead of sorting by the creation date? The real problem is the drop down menu where I’m going to a “collection page” and trying to generate a “navigate to page” link in the “drop down” - it needs to be sorted alphabetically or numerically otherwise is an extremely daunting task to visually scroll through all those out of sequence numbers.

No there isn’t, unless you can manage it perfectly when creating them and that problem remains with Blocs 3. I agree this needs fixing on larger sites. I am building a site of roughly 130 pages at the moment and that is already difficult enough to juggle in this sense.

For the menu situation, Blocs 3 should handle that quite nicely. Just set the source to none, then name any menu link as you like and set the page link. From that perspective it’s good and if you need to insert a page, just duplicate the menu listing and rename it. You can always organise the entries alphabetically using a text editor to work out the order in advance.

One golden tip I would offer is to create custom classes with really specific names on a project this size. They can always be duplicated, but if you are setting the H3 text size on a particular quote, you don’t want it messing up H3 tags everywhere, so I give them names like about-page-H3-quote-steve-jobs. Yes you’ll end up with an awful lot of custom classes, but at least their intended purpose is clearly defined.

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I wonder how sluggish Blocs 3 might become with so many pages. Already now with just a few pages I often have to wait some tiny fractions of a second until my keystroke or mouse click shows its execution. It’s often feels like an echo in my fingers. :thinking:

And for Flashman’s tip, I do name classes with the page name first. It helps tremendously to keep the overview. I just wish the Inspector’s class field would be a little wider (respectively with a horizontal scroll bar), because sometimes it is difficult to read a longer class name convention in a line.

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That fractional delay you mention could be down to a number of factors and I see that as well sometimes, but there is no indication here of a notable slowdown when working on a larger sized project. Having said that, it may slow down a bit as the project fills out with more video and images.

I’ve just played around a little using Blocs on this larger project with the system activity monitor open and CPU rarely went much above 30% on a machine that can hit 1600% with Maya. What I don’t know is whether Blocs is multicore enabled, but I would hope it is. I was able to use Blocs lately, even while exporting from Maya in the background.

The main reason I switched to Blocs from Rapidweaver was because of the big difference in speed. In Rapidweaver I see spinning ball all the time and simple page previews take several seconds at each breakpoint.

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Thanks for the info Flashman. This is good to know, that on larger and more up-to-date Apple machines it is possible to do larger website projects.
I cannot compare the speed of Blocs with Rapidweaver (never had it), however I do compare it with Affinity Photo running on my old MacBook Pro. It may sound like comparing oranges to pears and unfair, however, in Affinity Photo I have to do for a client really heavy picture rework in the size of 20 MB per image and only after 8–10+ FX Layers the app becomes sluggish. I admit my computer is not the newest anymore at all. Definitely too old to do movie editing with Final Cut Pro or Davinci Resolve Studio, but all other apps except Blocs (and Affinity Photo with a lot of FX calculation) work with no perceptible delay.
And luckily none of my Blocs projects are that large right now, though sometimes the delay in my typing fingers or mouse clicks annoy me a little. :smile:

I have an 8 Core Mac Pro from 2010 and I occasionally forget how old it is, however it’s fast, even by today’s standards with multi-core enabled software. I tried Blocs a couple times briefly on my 2007 iMac that I keep as an emergency backup and it seemed broadly fine, so Blocs should run pretty well on practically any modern hardware.

Unless Apple does the unimaginable and makes the new upcoming Mac Pro reasonably priced my next Mac will be a Mac Mini and I’m sure it will run just fine. I get spinning ball with Rapidweaver just opening a blank new project with no contents. No other app produces spinning ball like Rapidweaver on this computer.

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Oh my, this Rapidweaver is a thorn in many eyes here in the forum what I’ve read. I’m glad that I’ve never worked with it.
Mine is a mid 2010 MBP and also works still fine except for the aforementioned apps. I only wish the Apple computers would still be upgradable with RAM, etc. to keep the initial buy lower, hence more affordable. Hope it works out for you with the MacMini or even better with a MacPro. :crossed_fingers: I stop it here, because I’m off topic now.