Looks like I missed the ‘support Ukraine discount’ by a day - Slava Ukraini! nonetheless.
I have some questions. I’m still not sold on moving to Volt or any other CMS, as I prefer to edit offline with no disturbances due to flaky Internet, travel, etc., but we’ll see.
I have a site with well over 100 long, detailed pages, spanning some 8 or more top level categories, with a handful of sub-categories (could serve as tags) under each.
Is there any ability to sanely write content offline then import cleanly? (I’ve gone through years of even e.g. TinyMCE Rich Text embedded editors puking all over e.g. copy from among others.
Is there any sane way to convert aforementioned 100+ pages into VoltCMS blog posts?
How much flexibility is there in the editor, e.g. I have some patterns across the pages, but they vary page to page, e.g. most have either an intro paragraph or a two column with card or image on the right, para/text on left, but then ‘stack as I go,’ meaning the next section may be dual cards with caption and image, may be single row para, two column with text (1 col) and image or card (1 col). Is this supported within the online editor in a clean way?
Recent posts - Is the capability there to create recent posts per category? One of these days I may split the site apart, but several categories are related, so at the moment, no desire to.
Related posts - does this functionality exist currently in some fashion? (on either category or tag)
I am working on a website that is currently 111 pages with a lot of text, so I understand the difficulties that emerge.
I don’t see why you could not write using using like Pages and save as plain text, then copy paste into Volt. It is not difficulty to write directly inside Volt either using a desktop. Using a mobile might be tricky.
Not that I a aware of.
The layout is defined inside Blocs. In a nutshell you create predesignated areas that are then editable, however the conent within those areas is fairly flexible. Something I do as a little trick for client sites is to throw up empty areas with zero padding that will be blank on the page until filled.
In that way if you wanted an extra area with say three columns you could enable it by adding content, assuming the area was already present, however this is not like Blocks in WordPress where you can make up the layout as you go along. In other words you would need to plan in advance.
I have never created a blog site with Volt, so I’ll have to leave those questions to others. From personal experience I tend to find Volt works well for clients that will make occasional changes and happy to work within designated spaces. They like the simplicity and the way it feels almost like a text editor with the available tools.
TinyMCE is an embedded rich text editor that many web tools integrate as it is (or was, over a decade since working directly with it) pretty full-featured (for an embeddable editor within e.g. a CMS, not a standalone tool), but we consistently chased issues on users (copy from , paste into editor).
As @Flashman said, nothing wrong with a text editor or/clean text, but the lack of related content or recent content in different categories seems like its still a no-go for me.
Ok - I did look on your ‘demo’ instance but haven’t really seen a representative site. Is there an example of this anywhere? Are both categories and tags supported for generation of ‘recent posts’?
I can probably work around most of the other issues (e.g. edit in a clean text editor, then publish), recent posts per category is critical though.
Will have to look at the editor - how would you create content and e.g. add a two-column section in as you are creating content? Possible, or every page is a template, and if the latter - can you create and select from multiple templates per posting?
Any chance Volt will ever be able to create new pages from the browser using those templates? The other big one for me would be changing the Seo inside Volt.
Yes that would be the key issue to resolve with the navigation. At the moment it is a sticking point with new clients if they ask about adding new pages and I want to suggest using Volt.
That part is essential really if we have clients, who are making a lot of text changes on the page, but may find the Seo set in Blocs no longer matches the new page text.
One irony of all this is that I find very few clients ever change their sites beyond editing a few words, once they are built, but they really want the certainty that they can if needed. I am sure this applies to any other CMS as well.
Either the web design app is in full charge of building the main navigation (Blocs), or, the CMS. And currently there is only WordPress allowing the latter. Having a way to build the full navigation inside Volt CMS is a way off.
A combination of both (App + CMS) is difficult. There are ways to add items into the main navigation via JavaScript, which might not fit to the overall style of the navigation, or the indication of the current page.
Using a blog with additional posts as kind of a new page with its own navigation is a compromise of above challenge.
Thanks @Jannis (and others) for the responses.
Seems like the answer at this point, even allowing for some workarounds (I could edit offline in a text editor if need be, do a one-time script or manual content conversion), biggest issue for my use would be a lack of templates to select from at this point, or a ore dynamic editor for page to page layout differences. And yeah, I ‘could’ go Wordpress but am just really not a fan there. YMMV.
Will check back in 6 months and see where things are then. Thanks!
Please clarify this point - how to save what users have written via Volt?
Just do not overwrite folders like on the screenshot?
And if serious changes are made to the site will it work?
Hi @Newbie, if I’m reading your questions correctly:
The Volt areas (named by you in the building of the site) are uploaded straight to the CMS folder on your server. There is a backup of all of your CMS every day (you can see the folder named ‘backup’).
Volt will only overwrite the contents of the folders when you make changes, but earlier versions are in the ‘backup’ folder so you can copy out from there and revert if needed.
If by serious changes, you mean in the structure made by Blocs, then providing you keep page names and the volt areas named the same, then yes, all of those parts will be kept as they are.
You can add new areas, delete existing areas etc. but if you have a page and text called, for example ‘mypage’ and ‘mypagetext’, and keep these names in your changes, then Volt will keep the content.
Just beware, it is possible to overwrite the _CMS folder on the server whilst uploading files. (I think a combination of exporting all files from Blocs, not just changed ones, and an FTP program that updated everything on the server with the new files was what did it.)
