We have a new template design that needs to replace the existing one. Because of the amount of departmental specific pages in use we have 40 different page templates with widgets that have been added at the template level. Each of these templates have several styling assets or widgets that need to be updated for the new design. We are trying to push the new design live as soon as possible. Is there a faster way to update these page templates using shared widgets or assets with out having to manually update each one?
Hi Jesse:
Have you made the jump to our latest version, 2.7?
If so, I encourage your to take a look at our new design manager. Our new Design Manager will enable you to:
Enable pages to switch to a new template without loss of content
View and manage what pages are using which design
Enable template edits for pages already in the system
See a page when working on a template
Enable promotion of page content to template and shared content
Also, If you want to take a look at how to switch out your templates in CM1, I encourage you to take a look at our tutorial on switching templates out in CM1 by heading over to our Help site or clicking the link here:
https://help.percussion.com/percussion-cm1/design/templates/managing-templates/index
-Holly
Jesse,
As I outlined during our call last night, the best practice recommendation would involve a restructuring of you overall design scheme. Ideally you would be working with only a handful of base templates built off of your new template, as opposed to your current format of over 40 templates (this way any future design change will only need to be applied to a few templates, rather than over 40). Depending on the page level content in your various sections, these new base templates would house a handful of empty widgets, and then following the change templates steps we went over last night – and which Holly pointed out above – you will manually change each page’s template to one of the new base templates you have created.
If the new templates are formatted correctly, the page level content should sync up automatically (the content in the Rich Text editors, as we saw last night). Also note that whatever local content does not sync up after switching templates will be accessible through the “Unused Assets” expandable menu (which will be on the same toolbar as the Actions > Change Template option). You can manually drag and drop these assets into the empty widgets which you intended for them to populate.
While this will be your best long term option, I understand you might be looking for a quicker temporary way to update all of your existing templates. Note that this next possible step depends wholly on whether your designer made most of the changes to the new template through CM1 itself, or to the CSS file which styles the template. If it’s the latter case, you can try switching your old templates over to your new CSS file. To do this, open an old template for editing, click the Style tab, and find the new template’s CSS file (you can identify the new template’s CSS file by following these same steps with the new template), select it, and hit save.
If the majority of the new template’s changes were done through a new CSS file, this simple step might do the majority of the heavy lifting in terms up updating your old templates, and the remainder up the updates might be easy enough on a template-by-template basis. However, if your new template uses the same CSS file as your old templates, or if the new CSS file does not sync up cleanly with your old templates, then unfortunately the method I outlined above (restructuring your overall design scheme) will be your best option.
Let me know how you make out with the CSS test, of if you need further assistance with that.
Nathaniel
Thanks Holly and Nathaniel for the assistance!
Holly: we did upgrade to 2.7 on Monday and are looking forward to using the new features. I think the Design Manager will be very helpful with this issue.
Nathaniel: I think the CSS has already been updated but I will check. All the header and footer changes are at in the template because they were copies of the main template.
Thanks again!
Jesse
Ok Jesse, let us know how you make out with this. We’re here to help!