I have spent countless hours trying to build templates with the drag and drop regions. Had to rebuild over and over until I can get it to drop the regions in the right place. Its nice for simple edits and simple templates.
The more subregions the harder it gets. Having to do things like heigth:2000px just so I can get regions dropped in the right place. Then you place a region and it shows at the top of the list instead of the bottom until you name it or throw a widget in it. Its driving me crazy!!! I just want the option to see the code view of the div structure, with colpsible + - like firefox firebug, so I can create my regions by writting div tags please!!!
I understand your frustration here. The tricky part is, each region represents more than just a single Div, so it wouldn’t be quite as simple as creating Divs in a text-based interface. Still, it’s a very interesting idea that I’m sure a lot of HTML savvy users would find useful.
For now, I know a number of users (me included) will simply temporarily unlink the template from its main CSS file while making larger-scale structural edits, eliminating issues where regions overlap / shrink / expand in ways that makes accessing the regions you’re looking for difficult. To do this, you can toggle the template’s Theme through the Style tab, or comment out CSS file references from the template’s Additional Code insertion points.
To this end, another customer has requested the ability to simply disable CSS temporarily from the UI, in a similar fashion that you disable JavaScript. Feel free to lend your support to this idea, if you think that this would be useful to you as well:
Sandy, I’ve run into the same issues you have. Typically when on the layout view of a template, I often open Chrome Dev Tools (or Firefox FIrebug) and add hard coded heights/widths or z-indexes temporarily (as soon as you refresh, the added css rules will disappear) to the div regions I’m trying to access but can’t because of overlayed regions, or due to whatever other css properties cm1 tacks on. It’s still a pain, but works well enough for my needs.