Sparkle vs my current app – and text boxes/groups

Hi all, I have some a few questions since I consider starting to use Sparkle either exclusively or together with another app (Everweb).

Is it possible (or will it be possible soon) to add anchors to text boxes? This would be very useful for me, since I often move articles/elements up/down on my site, and if I move a text box, the anchor always moves with it. Anchors attached to ‘boxes’ vs. janitors that are just placed free seems to (based in my own former experience) be more reliable – eg. they always seem to work properly independent on which my visitors use when using my site.

I plan to keep using a main menu with 12 (!) main entries, plus Home and Contact icons. My menu has black background and white text, but when pages are made less wide, some of the menu items jumps down to below the menu area, where the background usually is white. Result: looks weird, unreadable text. My current solution is to have a menu background which is much taller than I otherwise would want it, so that even when the menu items jumps down a row or two, the black background is still tall enough to make the white text readable. How does Sparkle handle such situations?

Is there any obvious (I don’t think so) or non-obvious way to make a number of text blocs/groups stick to the top of my page (under the menu)? If all these groups always would try to stick to the top, one after another, and I moved one of my boxes or groups downwards, they wouldn’t overlap each other, since some other object would move up when I moved something else down. That works fine with my current ‘fluid’ site, but I have problems with other shortcomings in the app I use, so I hope that there’s at least a workaround for that in Sparkle. With up to 30-40 large or small articles on one page, it will be a lot of work to reorganise that page every time I want to move, remove or add something on that page (and even more work if I need to redo that separately for tables/mobiles etc).

Is there built in Soundcloud support? I haven’t found anything about that yet.

Any master page options?

Is there a way to solve this dilemma:
I’d like to have sidebars for desktop users, listing a long menu of articles we have, and I want that sidebar to not be shown on mobile devices. I managed to get that easily with Sparkle, but instead of removing that area behind the sidebar, it was shown as empty space – meaning that’s not a helpful solution for me, because I want to remove that who area on mobile devices. Any current or planned solutions for this?

Is there a way to add ALT text for images?

What about creating a group of objects – a heading, a collared background, title, subtile and main text, and move that whole group over to another page? That’s something I do when I have a long article, and want to present a mini-version of the same article on some other page, on order to make people go over to the main article and read it in full length. Tabloid papers and many magazines do such things all the time. Any good Sparkle solution for this? Everweb uses so called FlexBoxes for this, but I’m not a big fan of the workflow and reliability of those.

Thanks in advance.

@Vilhelm, I can offer the following…

  • Yes anchor tags can be placed on the page but not relative to an element like how you are asking but it sounds a good feature
  • From what you describe regarding your menu I would suggest a rethink in how it can be more user-friendly for your patrons
  • Yes, you can group the elements (select elements / right-click / group) and then you will see the options you have in the right-hand panel and sticking to top is one of them
  • You can add a sound file to the canvas… I’m unaware of there being Soundcloud support, but I’m sure you can “embed” that
  • No master page options
  • Yes there is a solution… select the sidebar and then on the right hand panel select “Arrange / (untick) Show on this device
  • Yes there is… when the image is selected your will see in the right hand panel you can place a description (alt) and / or a title. You can also go further and change the file name to further improve SEO for the page
  • If I’m getting you it is just a matter of selecting those elements, grouping them, and copying them and pasting that in another page
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Thanks for all your tips!
I did try the above and the contents of the sidebar was hidden, but what I’m looking for is to free that space so to speak… so that the element right to it jumps left. This way, the area occupied by the sidebar (at the leftmost side the page) won’t be shown as white empty space. I guess I simply can remove the whole sidebar when making a a mobile version of that page, and move the middle stuff to the left manually, but I’m wondering of there’s a simpler way.

@Vilhelm, Ok got you… And yes you have answered your own question correctly.

As mentioned, Sparkle isn’t what they call a fluid width framework but a fixed width framework so you would need to manually shift your elements around on mobile to occupy that created white-space.

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Hi again, I have edited my original post in order to clarify what I’m looking for: “If all these groups always would try to stick to the top, one after another, and I moved one of my boxes or groups downwards, they wouldn’t overlap each other, since some other object would move up when I moved something else down.”
Example: group #1 would be a small article about, say, apples, and contain an image, a tilte, subtitle and some regular text. Group #2 would be about oranges, and contain the same combination of elements. Is there some hidden way or workaround that makes it possible to swap the position of these/any groups, so that dragging the one about oranges above the one about apples, the one about apples would jump step down? This may be a feature most users wouldn’t need, but for me it would be very helpful.

@Vilhelm, I know what you are asking and it might be something Sparkle could have in future iterations but for now you would have to manually do so.

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