Hi, I’m finally migrating from Sandvox. I’ve looked at a number of other apps, including EverWeb, but Sparkle seems to be the best option. I’m sure I’ll have a lot of newbie questions, and may keep them in this thread if that’s OK. My first has to do with styles.
In Sandvox, I could modify the CSS (after sorta learning it) and thereby change everything on a site by changing one thing. Sparkle says “if you can use Pages, you can use Sparkle.” Cool! How about styles? In Pages, I can change Heading 1, Heading 2, etc. and it changes throughout the document.
Stuff like this is probably hiding in plain sight in Sparkle and I just haven’t seen it yet. In my case, some of my sites have over a thousand pages, and I’d really love to be able to make one global change rather than changing it on every page. How easy is that to do?
My second question is about template pages. In Sandvox, I could design a page template exactly how I wanted it, set it not to publish, then duplicate it, modify it, set the modified one to publish, then repeat as needed, always leaving the template unpublished. How do I do that with Sparkle?
With your first question the answer is yes. Sparkle allows you to make font styles (right hand panel) under the tab “Style”. Here is a link describing it all in detail - https://sparkleapp.com/docs/text.html
My next question is about transitioning best practices. One of my bigger sites is www.originalgreen.org, and I’d really like my Sparkle site to also be www.originalgreen.org - I haven’t yet experimented enough to get to the point of publishing anything, so this may be obvious, but what are the best practices for keeping the same domain?
Also, how customizable are the page URLs? I understand it’s almost certain that I’ll need to do a ton of redirects… unless, of course, I can make the URL whatever I like. I’m hoping that at least the top-level tabs (or whatever they’re called in Sparkle) the structure would be about the same. For example, I’m hoping that domain/blog in Sandvox could still be domain/blog in Sparkle. OTOH, what problems does that cause when building a big new site in Sparkle while keeping the Sandvox site up? Moving from iWeb to Sandvox was easy because iWeb made you use an acronym right after the domain name, so the predecessor site was domain/acronym - this forced me to build all the redirects, but kept the sites “firewalled” from each other, if you will.
Sparkle doesn’t do templates in how you have described it, but your can “duplicate” a page. In how you described it you can create the layout how you want and place that page in a “Section” which doesn’t interact with the navigation or is published. Everytime you want a new page based off it you can duplicate it and drag it into order of where you want it in your left hand column and then populate it with your new content before publishing it.
On the second question, so there’s not an option to leave a clean version of what I’m calling a template unpublished? It’s OK to duplicate an existing page, but then inconsistencies can grow if I forget to fix a little customization and keep repeating that version. Would be great to be able to keep a clean template like you can in Pages.
Sparkle has a slightly different way of doing common page elements, instead of a master page you make an element (or a group) visible on all pages (bottom of the arrange inspector).
You can also keep a base page design around (excluded from publishing, checkbox at the bottom of the page settings), and duplicate it when needed.
I would suggest to create a sub-folder on your hosting server account via FTP where you can publish your Sparkle website as you build it out. It would look something like “www.originalgreen.org/developement”. Once you are totally happy with it I would then remove your original website and republish your Sparkle website to the root directory where your original website sat and all should be good after that with the same domain name - and don’t forget to slap an SSL Certificate against your domain to secure it… Google and the likes are demoting your website without it.
You can customise your URL - go to the right hand panel under the “Page” tab.
Thanks, duncan… that works for me! Hoping to get a lot further into it this weekend. I love to see a developer participating in the conversation, BTW… thanks!
