cornell2 0 Report post Posted October 26, 2011 "we are working on more documentation for the sidebars, for now.. " January 2010 waiting for documentation on the CSS - so I can have some control over when and where they appear. So for my Pageline pro control panel on sidebars only has minimal control and effect. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Danny+ 1,327 Report post Posted October 27, 2011 Hi Cornell2, When you say "so I can have some control over when and where they appear", could you go into further detail what you mean please? Please search our forums, before posting! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
cornell2 0 Report post Posted October 28, 2011 For instance - if I want the sidebars to appear, well on the side - of 'box pages' etc... I realize that right now it is too much to ask for, to configure this from the Pagelines settings menus - and I need to extra efforts to create CSS to position the side on specific pages: But it would be nice if the IDs and classes were documented, so I (and many others) didn't have to do firebug triage on our pages in order to figure out which IDs and classes need to be overridden. I've been a 'member' (or customer) for 6 months now, and I can say that 90% of my time (and probably well over 50% of the content threads on these boards) are about figuring out how to get the layout and colors do to what we want. Most of the time folks are tossing out CSS suggestions that may or may not work... and really all this could be settled with a couple of pages of graphical documentation. As I get more knowledgeable with pagelinespro, I stumble across areas where the information is 'mentioned' or I start to 'get it'. But really - most layout and design questions 3-4 pages of documentation (not a video!) would save hundreds of hours in support time. Sorry for the rant, but I am happy with everything else about PagelinesPro - but this one issue is off-the-charts irritating and time draining. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Rob 547 Report post Posted October 29, 2011 @cornell2 - I totally understand your frustration with the issue of the boxes and sidebars. I'm not only here to moderate but also, I'm a paying client too and I wanted this. What I found is that the boxes, as good as they are, don't work for everything. Sometimes older solutions and creative ones work better. For example, on my site, which has been online 15 years (so I'm a bit experienced), I couldn't get the sidebars along side the boxes after weeks and weeks of trying. Heck, I couldn't get them next to the slider either. But with patience, I was able to get the slider to work next to sidebars. Failing to get either boxes or soapboxes positioned as I wanted, I dug into it and found they're just designed to work full width as they're presently coded. That's changing in the upcoming version, but in the meantime, I wanted boxes. Worse, I wanted mine to include content by category. I turned back in time and added tables, RSS feeds and plugins to do the job and surprisingly, in less than 2 hours I had my site looking just as I wanted it. The greatest time consumer there being that Wordpress (not Platform) doesn't work well with tables. They have to be individually styled so I had to research each table row, cell, image, etc. The investment however is paying. I've had a 40% rise in my Alexa rankings over a 3 month period and my visitor time spent on site has gone from 19 minutes 8 seconds to 64 minutes 39 seconds. My Alexa rank improved by over 55,000 and my Google ad revenues have trebled. Even my Amazon sales have risen considerably - for a US site, we sell over 2,000 GBP in goods monthly in the UK. By the way, if you did get the sidebars working along side the boxes or soapboxes, let me know. I'd love to see how and what you did. I also found a number of outstanding plugins - Mini Loops (placing content where you want it) and Div Up Content, which breaks up the Content area into boxes you can add specific content to as needed. I would have used these, but my requirement was for RSS fed content from other parts of my site with unique WP installs. Former PageLines Moderator, Food Expert and Raconteur Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
cornell2 0 Report post Posted October 29, 2011 Thanks for all the moderation and help, BTW I actually thought you were one of the developers in charge of support here! I am sure I *could* get the sidebars to work next to the boxes ... I have some unusual layouts already - by using custom CSS and very very specific placement (margins or absolute positioning) - but in this case it would be too 'hard coded' for my tastes and unmaintanable (if any of the boxes change or I try it with a new page it might cause a domino effect ....) I love pagelinespro, but I find that whatever I had gained using it, seems to be lost (double or triple) every time I spend hours trying to figure out something that should be very simple simple. In fact, it seems pagelines does some complicated things really well, but oddly, makes life miserable when trying to do something simple. OTOH - everything would be made easier if some simple documentation were provided. The more I dive in, the more I understand the underlying (CSS) design and architecture, and the more I see that a good deal of the information is actually available somewhere in the documentation or help - but it is waaay to obscure or subtle (for instance, documenting some of the CSS IDs/classes when I 'unhide' one of the drag and drop elements. it's nice to see, but that is one of the last places I would have looked.... and it is too little too late). But, like you, I have faith that the platform is a good investment of my time and energy for long term flexibility and maintenance.... Thanks for the tips on plugins (which should be another section of this forum!) .... PS - "Div Up Content" - was this a plugin, or was this a telling me what to do ? (ie.... use Share this post Link to post Share on other sites Create an account or sign in to comment You need to be a member in order to leave a comment Create an account Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy! Register a new account Sign in Already have an account? Sign in here. Sign In Now Login via PageLines Signup To PageLines Sign in to follow this Followers 0 Go To Topic Listing DMS & Legacy Products