I am becoming very frustrated with Pulse 4!
I have spent 2 days trying to get it working and no matter how often I read the docs, it’s just not happening for me. I know it’s my misunderstanding somewhere!
This is what I do:
install Pulse v4
edit config file to reflect the subfolder, i.e. in this case ‘/testcms’
In Freeway, apply the Pulse action to the page
change the page name to layout.php
upload to the Pulse ‘template’ folder and the site looks ok in a browser
login to Pulse
all I see are all the default ACME things in Pages and Blocks, etc. I thought that the action changed the page name, etc., no?
This is where I am STUMPED!
I have tried deleting all the Pulse default stuff, creating a new page called ‘home’, creating a new block called ‘home’, pasting in HTML from the Freeway site to the block. Previewing it looks fine. Then, I paste the block code, {{block:home}} into the ‘home’ page.
But… it doesn’t show up on the page when I preview it. The page just looks the same as it did originally.
There is clearly something fundamental that I just am not getting here, and I would really appreciate it if someone could enlighten me!
Have a look at igmack.co.uk/testcms. The password is ‘demo’.
Hi Iain,
Good to see you still trying with Pulse. I’d thought you’d given up?
When you applied the Pulse page Action in Freeway did you also add the Pulse - Add content Action as well? This defines the part of the page that Pulse uses to insert your page content so anything in the home, for example, Pulse page area (Pages > home) will show up in this area on your template.
Hi Tim, I did send you an email to say I was back in the room, but getting nowhere.
I’m still in a mess after I tried the Add Content action. Can you look at the usual site igmack.co.uk/testcms and see what on earth I am doing so wrong?
Hi Justin, thanks for that. (On a trivial note, my name is Iain, not Lain!)
I think you’ve hit on the cause of the issue here. It seems to be a path problem.
I replaced the ‘before’ code in layout.php with your ‘after’ code, and the Pulse block graphic showed up ok. That’s the good news.
However, the path to the other graphics was still wrong, so I went back into the layout.php code and changed all image paths from ‘Resources’ to ‘/testcms/template/Resources’ and all the images appear fine.
Now, this makes me think a few things
this surely must be an issue with Tim’s Pulse page action. Something I am not doing correctly, as I thought that it adjusted the paths to be Pulse friendly.
other paths in the layout.php file are also probably wrong, e.g. javascript, etc.
This system is not quite as ‘friendly’ as it should be, as we are digging into altering code, which (very!) casual coders like me would like to avoid!
Still, I am convinced that the problem must be with me, so hopefully, Tim will show me the way!
Thanks again for pointing me in the right direction.
Iain, What did you set the Template location path setting to in the Freeway Action? This is the name (or path) to your templates folder. Change this to /testcms/template and you should be set.
You have the tools you need to create Pulse templates, you just need to add the right values in the right places.
Tim,
Thanks again.
Did you see the emails I sent you? Basically, I don’t know why the testcms site had paths confused. I have since redone the test site from scratch and the path aspect works OK.
No need to change the Pulse action from ‘template’ as long as the Pulse path is set correctly to ‘/testcms’ in the config file.
I’ll post here what I asked you in the last email.
how does text formatting work in areas marked for Pulse content. I can see Header 1, etc. but where is the choice of font done etc.?
what is the process for creating multiple boxes of Pulse content? For example, in our standard test site, there is a full width top box with 3 boxes below. If I mark these for Pulse content using your action, they just get filled with whatever block is defined for that page, so all the boxes have the same content. How are the separate boxes identified in Pulse?
As you are designing your template in Freeway you’d design your core set of CSS styles there. You’ll have a set of named (class) styles like .fancybox, .leftcaption or .bigheading for example as well, hopefully, that are also tag only styles. These are all styles that are associated with an HTML tag so you could have one for H1, another for H2, yet another for P (paragraphs) etc. Now when you apply an element to some text in Pulse (making a string of text an H1 for example) the CSS styles you’ve defined in Freeway will kick in and style the item. The text editor in Pulse (called Redactor) won’t allow you to style text on the fly in the way I think you are used to as it is an editing tool rather than a designing one.
If you are using Pulse 4 (which i think you are now) you’ll be defining your page as a template/theme and storing it in Pulse as a layout.php file. If you are using the Freeway Action to make then theme then that will add in all of the bits you need to adjust the file paths to the CSS and images as well as allowing you to define an area that Pulse will use as its page content. You should only have one of these per page. Pulse will replace this section of the page with the content in the Pages > home (for example) editor. This will almost certainly contain HTML to hold the structure of this part of the page together. Within this code you can extract the parts of the page that you want to edit and replace these with blocks. The process is quite simple and requires you to copy the HTML from the page part and paste it into the block. Copy the block short code ({{block:home}} for example) and paste it into the page code where the HTML was copied from.
all the styles H1, H2, p (and temporary?) styles from the Freeway doc will be carried over? And show in the ‘Formatting’ menu in Redactor?
Only 1 Pulse content section per page? I’m confused again, so take the 3-box row in the testcms site, for example, how would I achieve that in Pulse?
Two side issues
a) the Pulse action is changing some code format, i.e. link rel=“stylesheet” to link rel=stylesheet Does this matter?
b) I’m not receiving notifications of replies here!
No. The tags style you define in Freeway will display on your public web site but won’t display at all in the Pulse editor. No new styles will appear in the style menu. If you get your styles worked out correctly in Freeway then you’ll be fine.
Only one Pulse page section per page. Within this page you can add as many blocks, galleries and Pulse forms as you like.
Define the page area in the template,
Within this page area add your HTML code for the page section and add as many blocks as you like
a. Unquoted attributes should be fine but it shouldn’t be happening. feel free to send me your Freeway document and I’ll test the Action against it.
b. Check your settings on the forum.
if the Pulse content section is empty with content being generated in Pulse, I don’t see how to attribute a style to a piece of text
have a look at the test site now. I have got the 3 blocks sort of duplicated, but there is no grey space between the boxes as per the row below which is not ‘Pulsed’. how do I achieve that?
b. My settings are OK, and I used to get notifications. Just not today!
Hi Tim,
I’ve sorted out 1) with styles within Freeway, but here is my new question along with my experience of the last couple of days.
OK, so having spent another few hours on this today, I have (sort of) got this working.
Have a look at igmack.co.uk/testcms. You will see 2 rows of 3 boxes. The bottom one comes from the template, and the top one from Pulse.
In order to achieve this stage, I had to do the following:
install Pulse and change config file path to point to /testcms
in Freeway, apply Pulse page action and insert a Pulse content action with width 100% and flexible height.
upload to template folder
create home-left, home-middle and home-right blocks
get code from Freeway page for each of the left, middle and right boxes by copying from the browser page after doing a Preview of layout.php
paste the code into the relevant Pulse blocks
no images showing up as the generated paths didn’t work, so
Replace - src="<?php echo $path; ?>/template/Resources/placeholder-threeLeft.jpg" with src="/testcms/template/Resources/placeholder-threeLeft.jpg"
create a home page in Pulse and insert the code for the 3 blocks
the style for the text in the left box (i.e. the style ‘testcms’ that I changed the colour to red) didn’t seem to carry over from Freeway, so I edited the layout.php file in ‘templates’ to try and sort this out. Although I only moved up and down the file to find the reference to the ‘testcms’ style, when I came out of the editor, it seemed to work!
Now, my immediate questions are
a) how do I create a gap between the 2 rows of boxes as Pulse seems to ignore whatever I code into Freeway in terms of margins, etc.?
b) why does the $path not seem to work at certain times or in certain places? There are occasions where this seems pretty flaky, in the sense that on occasions the $path works, and other times it doesn’t. I have uploaded 2 sites using the same process to different locations and the behaviour can be different.
Now, I realise that a lot of this may be down to my errors, but, not always, I feel. Maybe there is something wrong with the process described above, I don’t know.
Any help with a) especially would be greatly appreciated.
