Hi Everyone, long time no hear - but I missed you all dearly.
I need to reorganize my current site (https://craigmcdowall.com/) by adding a whole new area for my 2023 art show. I want people to arrive at the home page and immediately choose between the 2023 art show, and my older legacy work (which is the current site).
I would like to do this in a way which retains the current navigation on the original site. I would also like the new section to have its own navigation. I want to minimize work on menus.
It seems that I am going to need two sections: 1) the new 2023 show and 2) all the existing pages. Unfortunately I am already using sections in the original site, and I read that you can not have sub-sections. I donāt see how I could simply move my old sections into a new one.
Would anyone be able to provide some initial guidance as to my new setup, which could really save me a ton of time down the road, particularly in knowing what I am going to have to do?
The original site took a ton of time, and I donāt want to undo (and redo) the menu navigation unless absolutely necessary. It does seem time to turn off āauto add pageā in the menu setup, and create the new page using manual menu - or even buttons and hyperlinks or popups.
What would be the best way to make a new home page while keeping the current one as the head of the older pages?
Any thoughts before I launch into this new adventure with Sparkle? I appreciate it. The pdf download and the image are the same thing - the pdf is more readable.
I would suggest you to make 3 Sparkle projects for your site. One you already have - āolder legacy workā. The second would be your 2023 art and the third Home Page index.
āOlder legacyā and ā2023 artā would be contained in separate catalogs (subpages) in your public.html where you also place home page index where pointers to subpages (chosen by a visitor) are placed.
Please have a look at the pdf. Is that what you have in mind? I would need to create the two subfolders manually in FTP, and then direct Sparkle which subfolder for each ācatalogā of files. I assume Sparkle will create its own folders as shown. The site will end up with three different js and css folders, hopefully that will not lead to conflicts in the page display.
I can see where you are going with this, but I wonder if it would all become very unruly in short order. I also donāt know if I have thought through having another large exhibit opportunity in 2024-2025. I would want to add into the the site, and donāt think a Sparkle 4 is the answer.
It might be best to utilize what I have, and make a new section for the 2023 exhibit and slide shows. Then I would just update all the graphics on the index page so it looks exactly as I have explained, leading to the new section and the legacy works. I think the current index page would need to be recreated in the sculpture area.
Thanks, Craig
yes, the structure outlined in your pdf is exactly what I have on my mind.
I have been using this strategy for some time since I realised that my site is becoming too big to add new pages or modify existing. Especially when designing new page I like to test it, check with different browsers etc. It is quite not comfortable to do it with a live site. Test page is the answer. In case of a big multipage site it requires extra server GB and longer publishing time. Smaller Sparkle project is much more portable in this case.
There is a table of contents on my site Spis_treÅci The last chapter (Studia przypadku) is composed of independent pages. In total I have 8 Sparkle files which make up my site. My siteās front page (zbr.info.pl) contains only introductory information and a link to table of contents (I did it in this way to keep the real home page compact).
As far as technical issues are of concern there are no problems. When you specify publishing directory as e.g mysite.com/new_chapter Sparkle will create for you directory new_chapter when setting up publishing parameters. I have not noticed any problems with CSS or any other functional problems with multi subdirectory site.
I just want to chime in: I would have suggested exactly what zbr did. I had a similar problem and solved it with several Sparkle projects plus a āmain siteā which only helps to navigate. One part was even an old page that was made with Dreamweaver which I didnāt want to import into Sparkle.
The (big) advantage is that each site doesnāt become too big, can be changed much faster (and without any risks of messing up). And you can add a new site anytime by just changing the main site.
You both mention sites becoming too big. I have a multipage site, but it is not that big, perhaps a total of 25 pages. What I do have is a lot of photos, which takes some time to upload. That said, Sparkle only uploads changed files / images - so once the images are uploaded things go pretty fast after that. So my question is, what defines a ābigā site. I would think that would be 100 pages +. My Sparkle file is 1.2 GB, which is bigger than my very first hard drive, but by todayās standard seems reasonable.
Using the Preview button I am able to quickly and accurately check edited pages in several web browsers, so testing is not really an issue here.
