I’m working on a site that has a substantially different landing page with multiple subsections organised into subfolders. I seek suggestions on organisational ‘better (best?) practices’. Specifically, Is it more efficient to set up multiple Sparkle documents, to be independently uploaded into the different subfolders, or arrange a single Sparkle document with multiple sections/folders?
The multi-document option seems cleaner with less complications (e.g., when making the site ‘responsive’) while one challenge is to remember to backward copy/paste all subsequent standard changes. The single-document with multiple sections seems easier upfront but applying header/footer/menu stuff across sections seems tricky.
I’m leaning toward the multi-page option but welcome pros/cons for either, or suggestions for some third option that shows I am as loopy as I feel . This is to write that all thoughtful suggestions will be much appreciated.
Thanks to all who post questions and provide responses in this commnity, particularly Duncan. Sparkleapp makes webpaging (too?) fun.
Hi @PPEmail, my suggestion is always to use a single project. The exception to this are when different parts need to go to different domains (Sparkle can’t do that currently), or when you need per-language versions of the pages that Sparkle currently has only one instance of (privacy, search results).
Having a single project file makes it simpler to share color and text styles, and make things uniform via “show in all pages” kind of settings.
Also you can’t make a single sitemap.xml file if you publish multiple projects.
Two questions arise: #1:
What happens to Sections when a site is altered for different screen sizes, when made ‘responsive’? I mean, ‘responsive’ changes apply across the site, correct, or can one apply the ‘responsive’ changes by section only?
Part of the reason I ask is because, it appears, that the sparkleapp.com site is ‘responsive’ on some pages but not all (e.g., the landing page but not the (English) Docs folder?). Is it a single document? Or maybe this is due to different languages exception?
#2:
What procedure do you recommend for building across multiple documents, duplicating the root document or is there a better procedure?
Perhaps this question is getting to applying one CSS across multiple documents? Is there a convenient method for doing this using Sparkle app? Could one (reasonably) use the output folders to apply across multiple documents/sections/sites, or would this just break everything? (Maybe this would be essentially coding…?)
You likely have answers to these question in the (extensive, Thanks!!) documentation. If so, please direct me to them. I looked but perhaps missed them. I’m still trying to get my head around some of this stuff. It seems to be happening, but my ‘old’ brain is acquiring this info too slowly. Well, to be honest, ‘age’ is just a convenient excuse for a lifetime behaviour .
Many thanks, again, for the great app and clear instructions.
The Sparkle website is clearly multiple documents for historical reasons. Yes that allows you to not make some pages responsive, but I wouldn’t recommend it. You can’t make only some pages responsive, they all need to have the same devices.
There’s no way to use a common CSS across multiple documents, and in general I’d advise against using multiple documents except for the cases stated above. There isn’t really a good workflow to manage multiple documents.
),
. This is to write that all thoughtful suggestions will be much appreciated.