Pages - Best practice configuration for news and articles

[The Old Man]

I'm totally confused by Pages. On IP.Content I had my news articles displayed nicely on my home page, and was able to have other non-news articles on different pages of my site but they all used 1 index.php page.

Using Pages, my news and non-news articles are still in the same database called Articles, but if I add the Database to my Home/News page, set it to 'Show as articles on homepage', select only the News category to show, select one of the new templates in 4.1, it still insists on showing every article from all of my categories and not just my news articles.

I was told by tech support some months ago I had to create a second page to display my other article categories on because my home page displays a welcome intro block that I don't want on every page which makes sense. But if I add the database to my second page called content, it says it's already in use on my home/news page. 

All very confusing.  How do you configure your news articles to show on your home page and non-news to show on other pages?

I thought about moving my news articles to a seperate database, but it won let me move them between databases.

 

[CheersnGears]

I really don't understand the One-Page-Per-Database limitation. It seems to be an absurd limitation. 

I'm running into another issue that I will be submitting a bug report on shortly.  If you have a Database added to a Page, and then remove that database block from the page, there appears to be no way to put it back on the same page because you get the "Already in use on page 'X'" error.  The only way I can overcome this is to delete the page and start it over again.

The only thing I can come up with for your category issue (and I have the same issue) is that the entire page must be built using blocks and not the database feed. 

[opentype]

7 hours ago, The Old Man said:

All very confusing.  How do you configure your news articles to show on your home page and non-news to show on other pages?

The database PAGE is where the records really are. They are tied to that page through their URLs and that’s also the reason you can’t put a database on several pages or several databases on one page. 

If you want the freedom to show your articles in different layouts, e.g. on your homepage with an additional welcome message, then don’t use your database page as homepage. Instead, create a regular (static) home page and put BLOCKS on it. In these blocks you can show anything you want, including various feeds from all your databases. 

[NewRockRabbit]

Pages urgently needs some quality documentation

[SJ77]

3 minutes ago, NewRockRabbit said:

Pages urgently needs some quality documentation

+1 (have been confused since the first release of version 4)

[ABGenc]

As @opentype suggested, the best way is to have a seperate page and put any blocks from any database you like. Following topic can give you idea how to achieve it. It may seem hard at first but the more you get into it gets clearer ;

 

[CheersnGears]

34 minutes ago, opentype said:

The database PAGE is where the records really are. They are tied to that page through their URLs and that’s also the reason you can’t put a database on several pages or several databases on one page. 

If you want the freedom to show your articles in different layouts, e.g. on your homepage with an additional welcome message, then don’t use your database page as homepage. Instead, create a regular (static) home page and put BLOCKS on it. In these blocks you can show anything you want, including various feeds from all your databases. 

Some issues with that:

You end up with an extra, superfluous breadcrumb level when you do that. It inserts the breadcrumb of the Database page in the article... and since we are so limited with how that the database entries display to end users, we may not want to display that page.  My current breadcrumb may be Home -> Reviews -> Quick Drive.  On 4.x with the setup you describe, it ends up being Home -> Articles* - Reviews -> Quick Drive..... Articles being the page name for database page you describe above.

Of course... we have to leave that Articles page visible to all because otherwise if that permission isn't granted to the user, the article will not display.

 

[The Old Man]

On 8 November 2015 at 16:37:01, opentype said:

The database PAGE is where the records really are. They are tied to that page through their URLs and that’s also the reason you can’t put a database on several pages or several databases on one page. 

If you want the freedom to show your articles in different layouts, e.g. on your homepage with an additional welcome message, then don’t use your database page as homepage. Instead, create a regular (static) home page and put BLOCKS on it. In these blocks you can show anything you want, including various feeds from all your databases. 

Thanks, the issue with this besides what others have said is that all you get is an ugly list of records, unless I'm missing something. How do you use the new templates finally provided if you're using a block?

Much appreciated.

[opentype]

8 hours ago, The Old Man said:

How do you use the new templates finally provided if you're using a block?

Someone with HTML knowledge would need to customize the block templates the way you want it. 

[The Old Man]

Thanks, I appreciate the response but that's the problem right there. I have everyday HTML knowledge (I'm no genius) but no knowledge of tags etc, this should work out of the box surely? Who has time to research and learn how to code templates when they're now finally included in Pages after all these months. The whole issue around IP.Content was it was too difficult to use, but now in Pages it's even more difficult in some ways.

I looked at that topic linked to above and it seems like a lot of desperate admins frustrated that changes in new 4.x releases broke their custom templates and are waiting for fixes. I can't have that, far too much stress and worry in my life already!

We should surely be able to show different categories from a database on various pages like in IP.Content 3.4.8.

Honestly, Pages and widgets are cool, but talk about stressful and confusing!

[opentype]

10 minutes ago, The Old Man said:

… this should work out of the box surely?

… and it does. You can create your pages and drag & drop widgets on them without touching any template code. And this is an improvement over 3.4.
If you want to change the appearance of certain parts, it’s customization again. I would put the request for more article-style block templates in the feature request forums. 

 

13 minutes ago, The Old Man said:

We should surely be able to show different categories from a database on various pages like in IP.Content 3.4.8.

I’m not sure I understand this part. What did you do exactly regarding categories in 3.4 that you can’t do anymore in 4.x?

[The Old Man]

Well I've decided to have another go at sorting out my news articles. I want them to appear in the 1x2x2 style layout using the new article templates on my welcome/home page, that is called index2. Index2 currently has a welcome block of text, and a slider/carousel. I want the articles to appear under my slider.

I understand that you can only link 1 database to a page, so I've created a second dedicated database for my news articles, that I want to show using one of the included article layouts on my Welcome Home Page,  below my carousel and welcome text blocks, instead of the current ugly list of news records I have at present existing layout shown attached)

 

How do I move the articles from my old Articles database's News Category into my new News Articles Database (has no categories)? It only lets me move articles between categories in the same original database.

Secondly, how do I prevent the Add Article page on the front end from showing all the full content and images on the home page so that I just see the sections to add a new entry instead of my whole page and images from my slider carousel block.

This is a bit of a nightmare that's putting me off using Pages for another site. Is having a dedicated news article database seperate from your other content/non-news articles from day 1, the best practice method when creating a new website (to avoid issues down the road)?

Many thanks!

[opentype]

8 hours ago, The Old Man said:

How do I move the articles from my old Articles database's News Category into my new News Articles Database (has no categories)? It only lets me move articles between categories in the same original database.

There is no ACP option for that. Partly, because Pages databases are not even meant to be compatible. Each one can have totally different fields. 

 

8 hours ago, The Old Man said:

Secondly, how do I prevent the Add Article page on the front end from showing all the full content and images on the home page so that I just see the sections to add a new entry instead of my whole page and images from my slider carousel block.

The blocks you put on the page itself, will appear in each view of that page, including the add record view. There isn’t really a way around it unless you manually code the elements into each specific view template instead of putting them on the page. 

 

8 hours ago, The Old Man said:

This is a bit of a nightmare that's putting me off using Pages for another site. Is having a dedicated news article database seperate from your other content/non-news articles from day 1, the best practice method when creating a new website (to avoid issues down the road)?

I don’t know enough about your page to say what’s best in this specific case. If you have a database with articles, but only want some of them on the homepage, I would suggest to turn on the option to only show featured articles on the front page. This gives you the admin option to decide per article what should appear on the front page. 

[The Old Man]

Thanks for the responses, much appreciated. I'm not sure about the last suggestion, will give that some thought.

I spotted an option to download. What if I was to download a copy of my original Articles database from the AdminCP, could I then upload it back as a new second database effectively making a duplicate copy, then delete the non-news articles and categories so that I could link the second news only database to my home/news page and delete the original news category from my original database so it is linked to my non-news pages?

I feel like I'm either missing something or doing something wrong because the developers wouldn't have created a system that's like this. The combined news article and other articles database system in 3.4.x was much simpler and just worked.  I know these issues are as a result of me upgrading my site to Pages, but there should be some thought given as to how we accomplish a simple news article facility on a home page with non-news articles on other pages. It's like it's almost there, but not quite. 

 

 

 

 

[opentype]

The download option is about the fields, not the records of the database. That won’t help you. 

 

11 minutes ago, The Old Man said:

The combined news article and other articles database system in 3.4.x was much simpler and just worked.  

Nothing has really changed in that regard. It works the same way under the hood and can be used in the same way as in 3.4. IP.Content just gave the appearance in the ACP that the article database and the other databases were something different. But they really weren’t.  

 

11 minutes ago, The Old Man said:

I know these issues are as a result of me upgrading my site to Pages, but there should be some thought given as to how we accomplish a simple news article facility on a home page with non-news articles on other pages. It's like it's almost there, but not quite. 

Certainly possible. In fact, it’s possible in so many different ways, I can’t even name the one suggested way.