V3 page template issues

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Martin Wynne
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Joined: Mon May 12, 2003 3:21 pm
Location: West of the Severn, UK

V3 page template issues

Unread post by Martin Wynne »

Hi Tim,

For months I have been telling myself every morning that I prefer the new V3 responsive skins to my heavily-customized PP1 skin. Until now without success. But today I have been looking looking long and hard at the V3 skin on my Android phone and my Surface Pro tablet, and it slowly dawned on me that I do actually prefer it. :)

So I have made a decision to stop fighting it, and go with the flow. From now on I am going to use your skins pretty much as supplied, without trying to change everything. Life is too short.

But one area is puzzling me. In the V3 responsive skins I seem to have lost the ability to use custom page templates. :?

Even the most anodyne addition to the Default page template no longer seems to work. In the Toolbox I tried adding a paragraph above <%TOPIC_TEXT%> containing no more than a single line and a link. I wanted this to appear at the top of every topic page -- but it doesn't appear. I can make it appear by doing an F5 reload on a topic page, but after going to another topic and back to the first, it has gone again. Needing another F5. I can only assume this is something in the page scroller script.

It's not the end of the world. I have now added it to all my topics by editing the XML, and I just need to remember to add it to all new topics, probably as a snippet.

But I can't find anything about all this in the PP Help -- what am I missing?

regards,

Martin.
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Tim Green
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Re: V3 page template issues

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Martin,
Martin Wynne wrote:Even the most anodyne addition to the Default page template no longer seems to work. In the Toolbox I tried adding a paragraph above <%TOPIC_TEXT%> containing no more than a single line and a link. I wanted this to appear at the top of every topic page -- but it doesn't appear. I can make it appear by doing an F5 reload on a topic page, but after going to another topic and back to the first, it has gone again. Needing another F5. I can only assume this is something in the page scroller script.
No, it's not the scroller script. It has to do with the way the new WebHelp 3.0 format loads topics while you are browsing. Since the topic pages are now effectively your layout page, the first page you load loads all the layout components. Once you start browsing you actually stay on that page, in the same way that you stay on the index.html Layout page in the WebHelp 2.0 system. To load a new topic the body of the topic is loaded into the content div from a compressed JSON file. That file only contains the content of the topic from your project. So it will not include any additions that you put into the template.

This is one of the restrictions of doing it this way. There are huge benefits for browsing speed and support for mobile devices. However, it becomes more difficult to add components from the templates. For example, this also includes the footer at the bottom of the topic. For that to be updated on every page there has to be a special component for it in the script.

This is only going to change when becomes possible to add components to the content that is inserted with the TOPIC_TEXT variable, which would have to be a change in HM, not in the skin.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Martin Wynne
Posts: 2656
Joined: Mon May 12, 2003 3:21 pm
Location: West of the Severn, UK

Re: V3 page template issues

Unread post by Martin Wynne »

Thanks Tim.

Most of the lost page template functionality can be achieved by means of topic templates, specifically default.template.xml

It would be worth adding a note about that to the PP3 Help -- assuming it is not already there and I'm blind. :)

regards,

Martin.
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Tim Green
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Re: V3 page template issues

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Martin,

No, this information is not currently included in the Premium Pack help. There is a possibility of a new kind of dynamic variables being introduced relatively soon, which could solve or at least alleviate this problem. So for the time being I don't want to muddy the water with information on something very technical like this, when it may change.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
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