Not something used often but very useful for breaking down long passages of text, FAQs etc.
I’ve been working on a site that involves listing a news headline for each day - for a year - and the list is getting very long. I don’t want to spread the list over several pages. At the moment I’m using the “scrollable” text option which is OK but can be a bit tricky to use on mobiles and involves a pretty ugly scroll bar on desktops.
If i could toggle text in sections I could break down my days into months which would be easier to use and look better.
Probably not a very high priority request but maybe sometime…
Love using Sparkle, it’s a breath of fresh air after working on Wordpress sites.
As for me I started requesting these features since 2018, Mouse hover pop ups, Tabs and Accordion. I think there are basic features sparkleapp should have incomparism with Adobe Muse, since a lot of non-coders using Sparkleapp now use to fire websites with Adobe muse. So many widgets helped us create amazing sites with Adobe muse. Now that they are leaving Muse for Sparkleapp, Duncan should ensure the basic features can be accessed. Tabs, Accordion Panels, Link Anchor Tags to Accordion Panels and especially Smart Pop Up’s (for product features, online store building, guides). All these features decreases the number of pages as well as page length. My friends and I where using these features a lot in adobe muse. After introducing Sparkleapp to them, they loved it after testing it but decided to settle on Mobirise app and Webflow because it contained these features. I pray that Duncan would address this as quickly as possible.
Guys have also thought about the introduction of pen tool as well, since its all about designing. If there is a text wrap feature why not a pen tool.We don’t have to leave sparkle and fire Apple pages to get some shapes designed and pasted into Sparkle app.
I feel I need to add a note here to explain. So just to reassure everybody, this is an exceptionally common request, so we will need to address it, and we will.
The problem as it is today is nothing in Sparkle changes in size from the canvas to the output site. It’s not entirely true because embedded content sometimes does, but that then causes issues and breaks the layout. And there are ways we could account for it or work around it currently, but we have better solutions coming down the line.
Then there’s the “why” question. Accordions satisfy the “there’s too much text on this page” issue, but it’s a terrible solution. Have you ever been on the visitor end of a FAQ made with accordions? It’s a click-fest, with the page changing and moving under your cursor all the time. And on mobile where space is constrained it’s even worse. Seriously, accordions make for terrible experiences, it’s like an engineer found a solution where the designer wouldn’t – and it wasn’t a wise choice.
So if accordion/faq style is so bad, what’s the alternative? It’s much harder and content-specific, which is why accordions are the easy way out, but you can read this article to get an idea:
If you have scanned this post and missed what I wrote above, yes we will add accordions at some point in the future.
Seems to be loading a new page each time you click, which is perfectly possible in Sparkle (with a bit of work in duplicating the rest of the content in other pages).
The point of accordions is generally to be low friction, so instant content swap. Same for tabs.
The problem of “having too much content to show” is always one of choice and focus. Same for the hero sliders (which are also hard to do in Sparkle).
Yes I have already implemented what you said about tab content in sparkle loading separate pages, in a new website that I’m working on. It is a bit of a pain, and you def need a good intake of caffeine when sorting it out though! haha!!
This is a tricky topic but in most part the client and I sit down and we make sure that the content created answers the important questions so nearly always I don’t have a need fo for a FAQ accordion which I find a terrible experience on mobile.
In the end it is just as simple creating a dedicated page for the FAQs and have it in an A and Q setup/format instead of constantly clicking a bar to fall open for the answers. Even the font colour used would allow for an easy flow of information viewing - the question in a bold black, the answer in a mid-grey… and of course relevant grouping will go a long way in making the client get to what they want to know instead of going on a hunt.
Looking at this site made me think if this request. Accordion example
Only looked at the mobile site. But seems well done. Still a lot of clicks though.
I’d far prefer the energy to go into making the mobile resizing side of sparkle automatically. It’s such a pain to build the mobile side each time a new page added. It’s what killed using Sparkle for me…
