Hey there,

I'm working for a company that wants me to recreate their style-guide with Couch. The design team is supposed to be able to edit the pages and edit the content completely without the need of HTML knowledge. The site should essentially have the same functionality as http://www.frontify.com, where you can add multiple elements like rich text, images or even a font showreel.
I'm pretty new to couch, so I'm not sure how to build this. One possibility would be to set up a different page for each topic, so e.g. a separate template for the sub-page "Logos" and a separate template for "Colors" and one for "Fonts" etc. This seems a) rather tedious and b) even those pages would need to be fully customizable, i.e. the user needs to be able to add as many elements as he wants. So I was wondering if there's a way to just have one page-template where you can just add as many elements of different kinds (which would of course be pre-defined by the dev, me) as you want.

I've tried implementing something like this with repeatables, but the only way that would work for me is to add all the possible element templates to the repeatable and that way the admin section is awfully bloated, see screenshot.

Unbenannt.PNG (65.46 KiB) Viewed 1756 times

Is there a way to smoothly implement this kind of functionality or is it a better idea to just create a site for each topic and have smaller repeatables in those?

Thanks in advance,
Luke

[trendoman]

Hey, screenshot is not attached yet.
In my view, this work seems to be too complicated and possibly requires extensive JS-experience.

P.S. On their website they are pretty clear about requirements to build something similar:

Frontify is made with tons of Swiss chocolate.

Taking into account the size of their team Vs you alone, it is advisable to start saving for at least 10 tons of swiss chocolate bars to begin with.

Woops, I added the screenshot now!

Taking into account the size of their team Vs you alone, it is advisable to start saving for at least 10 tons of swiss chocolate bars to begin with.

Obviously I'm not expected to build exactly the same, but with a similiar, albeit less user friendly and polished, functionality. Generally just a way to add predefined elements to a page.

I have now started building the site with different templates for the different topics, which all have different repeatables depending on what the topic needs to have. Is that the best way to approach this?

[KK]

Hi,

Given the current features of Couch, I don't think it'd be easy to create this kind of functionality.

However, as it happens, I am in the process of developing a new addon that would be perfect for just this sort of thing.
It is named 'Mosaic' and, as the name would suggest, it allows adding any number of rows where each row ('Tile' as referred to by the addon) can have a unique structure of its own (may even contain repeatable regions).

So, for example, in your case, you could use a single mosaic in your template and then define tiles for 'colors', 'fonts'. logos' etc. The user can then easily create pages choosing different tiles for the mosaic ordering them as they like.

That said, I am only about 50% through with this at the moment. So, the addon is still some time away before it can be released.

I don't suppose you would be able to wait that long so, I am afraid, for the moment I don't see any easy way of implementing your use-case.

[trendoman]

The site should essentially have the same functionality

Obviously I'm not expected to build exactly the same [..] functionality.

What really is obvious, is that you don't have a strict plan to follow. Good luck with that.