Improvements to Template Management
Development of IP.Content 2.1.0 is well underway, and we've reached the point where we are ready to start sharing with you some of the things you can expect to see updated in IP.Content 2.1.0. We hope you are as excited as we are about the upcoming update, so without further ado, let's cut to the chase...
Revision Support
Have you ever been editing your page templates and made a change that you wish you could undo, but weren't sure what the template was like prior to making your change? Or maybe a helpful admin on your site made a change to a database template that you later discovered broke some functionality that you had previously added? There are often times when you may wish to review, or possibly even restore, a previous version of one of your templates. With IP.Content 2.1.0 this will be possible through the administrative interface.
Anytime you edit a template in IP.Content 2.1.0, a backup of the template is saved in the database. A new menu option available for each template allows you to easily review all of the stored revisions.
When you click on "Manage Revisions" it brings you to a new page that will list all of the stored revisions for a given template in reverse chronological order.
From this page, you can edit and delete any previously stored revision. You can also restore a revision from this screen. If you restore a revision, the current copy of the template is stored as a revision for future reference. You can also compare a revision from this page against the currently active version of the template, allowing you to pinpoint exactly what has changed.
In addition to all template types (page, database and article templates), revision support is also available for pages! That means if you need to restore an older copy of a page, you no longer have to worry about finding a backup somewhere - just use the revision manager to keep track of all your changes, and backtrack through them as needed.
Sharing Made Easy
Many of our users have asked for an easy way to share templates, and we are pleased to announce that IP.Content 2.1.0 will now include the ability to import and export any of your page, database and article templates.
From the template listing screens, you can now export both individual templates AND entire categories of templates
If you export an entire category of templates, the category and ALL templates in the category will be included with the export. Of course if you export a single template, only that template will be included in the export.
After you export the template, you can then import the template into any IP.Content template screen.
If you import an XML export that contains a category, the category will be inserted if it does not already exist. All templates that do not exist will be inserted as well, otherwise templates that already exist (based on the "template key") will be updated.
We hope that the ability to export and import templates will help customers in 2 primary ways
We hope these template manager updates provide you with useful tools to help you better manage your website. We also hope that the import/export functionality is utilized to build a robust collection of community-contributed templates that everyone can benefit from. If you have any questions or feedback, we'd love to hear from you! Otherwise, stay tuned for our next IP.Content development update blog entry...
[*]It should now be much easier to transfer templates from a development site to your live site. After setting up your database, article or page templates how you want, you can export them and import them into your live site. [*]Skinners can now create IP.Content templates and share them easily through the resource site. This allows for skinners to share free and paid IP.Content templates with users, and allows users who are not as familiar with HTML and CSS an easy way to install templates without having to code them from scratch.