In the past I’ve set up basic draft projects in Blocs as a basis for new websites, so things like the text sizes are already setup, along with certain typical pages being in place with basic text where appropriate, such as privacy and copyright pages.
It slightly bugs me that we cannot have two Blocs projects open at the same time or drag content between them, so I’m thinking of building a large number of shareable template pages and possibly integrating them with October CMS. Another idea is to create a single folder filled with local fonts for easy selection and I’ve created a folder now where I can source projects attachments.
I would be curious to know about any time saving ideas and strategies that others might have for making website production faster and pain free as possible using Blocs.
I agree that it would be great to be able to open two Blocs projects at the same time.
For now, I am getting the best out of Page Templates feature available in Blocs. I save pages from all projects I have ever worked on to Page Template library, and assign tags to all pages.
It is important that all custom classes in each page are uniquely named, so when saving each and every page I renamed all custom classes, so they do not mess the current project I am working on.
@Eldar that looks very clever and an obvious time saver. I agree the custom classes need to handled with care and I’m hoping Blocs 3 will provide us with some means of managing these more effectively. Have you thought of creating these template pages so they are immediately available as part of a CMS?
I don’t really use any CMS platform with Blocs at the moment, but I think it won’t be too difficult to export any page you like into a CMS template? I’ve never tried it, so can’t say for sure. I am very interested to see how you would implement it.
I’ve not used any CMS yet with Blocs, however I want to experiment with October CMS over the next few days and see what is possible. My thought was that pages could be built with editable elements placed inside the October CMS bric, then saved as template pages.
It should in theory be possible to start exporting websites very quickly indeed and even edit them online at this point.
Last week I found myself helping somebody with a Wordpress site he had built himself using a fairly typical theme. I made a couple business suggestions, such as including a private client area and I was stuck by how easy this was for him to implement by simply finding the right plugin. This led me to thinking that I need to overhaul the way I use Blocs to become more efficient and in a sense more competitive.
Actually, I do have a system. Because all of the pages I have in Template Library are templates I build, each page from the same template comes with a template name before the custom class name.
For example, almost all of my projects have social icons and buttons custom classes, so I add a template name (in your case, it might be a website name) and then social-button, or social-icon.
Below is the screenshot of the custom class manager from one of my projects. The name of the project is Personality, so every custom class I have added has a suffix ‘personality’.
That makes good sense. The only potential problem I can see is that even if you change the name of a custom class after making an adjustment those changes are still carried across everywhere, including the new name.
Lets say I have a custom class called project1-botttompadding100 that is saved as part of a template. I might use that template in a new project about fishing and change the class to fishing-bottompadding130 with 130points of bottom padding instead of 100.
Given that the custom class was part of a template, wouldn’t that change in padding occur everywhere that includes that template page? It works that way in non-template pages.
I haven’t tried this, but I suspect the only way around that would be to create new template pages whenever you alter a custom class on a template, which sounds a bit messy.
In programming languages we have the concept of name-spaces. This is a bit like scope but the language uses context to distinguish the same name used for different purposes (eg in C one can use the same name for a function and for a variable and the language uses context to distinguish them).
It might be useful (dear @Norm) for Blocs to allocate a distinct name space for each project so that a reused class name was the specific variant of that class for that project. Copying/importing between projects would implicitly create the object in the receiving name space. This would be more or less invisible to the user but have the intuitive effect that changing a class in one project would not affect another. This would appear to extend naturally to templates and automatically provide what @Eldar is currently doing manually.
