What the heck is this Manage Content Areas thing?!

< Websiteforge Upgrades June 10, 2007

July 2, 2007 Websiteforge Updates >

July 6th, 2007 at 11:33 am star

Manage Content Areas is a very useful tool to help you in copying content from one page to many pages. It allows the user to select from copying by Reference or by Value.

Copying by Reference means that whatever is copied and pasted only needs to be changed in the future on one page and it will change the same information on all other pages that were pasted by Reference.

Copying by Value means that the item or items copied and pasted are only copied and pasted. So if a user makes a change on one page with the same information, then that change will not affect the other pages with the same information.

So, with that explanation you may still be scratching your head! If you go to Manage Content Areas you'll notice that the first item is a drop down with the list of pages on your site and next to it is a drop down with the different content areas if you have them. To copy information from one page to many, select that page from the drop down, then select the content area that you wish to copy and click Select. Next you'll want to expand the pages below the drop downs to paste the information onto those pages. Next, check the checkbox for the pages you want to copy to and select from the drop down whether you want to Copy By Reference or Value. Once finished click Apply at the bottom.

This feature works wonderfully for header graphics if you have the same ones on all pages, or footer text when you first set up your pages, or if you have a content area under your navigation bar you can mass copy/paste using this feature.

A word of caution, however, if you copy main content areas to other pages, then you could very well have fifteen pages that all have the same information on them. :) This feature does not copy certain frames but entire content areas.

If you have any questions, please feel free to post messages here or visit Live Support.

Olivia E Guerrero
Customer Service
Project Manager Assistant
Training Specialist
www.websiteforge.com

Posted in Tips and Advice by Olivia Guerrero

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Jeannine says:

July 6th, 2007 at 12:35 pm star

Hi Olivia,

Thanks for this helpful info. Would this apply to BROWSE BY CATEGORY/BROWSE BY BRAND navigation pane? I'm having difficulty setting this up correctly (I already asked Terry & have msg in to KevinL, but hoping to clear this up today).

Thanks in advance for your reply.

Jeannine

Olivia says:

July 6th, 2007 at 2:15 pm star

Hi Jeannine,

That would be a per frame copy and paste and that's not what this does. To copy and paste by Reference one frame at a time, use the copy function on the toolbar for frames and when you get to the next page, paste using the Share Frame Content icon.

Olivia

paul says:

July 7th, 2007 at 6:08 pm star

Hi Olivia,
Terry setup a page for declined charge card help. I would like to add this information with a lead comment on a Faq page which I have yet to build. Can I use MCA to do this?

Olivia says:

July 8th, 2007 at 10:12 am star

If I understand you correctly Paul, the page that was set up was just a regular content page but you want to use the Manage Content Area function to paste that information into a FAQ frame type? That's not possible. It will not convert the rich text on the first page to a FAQ frame type on the second.

However, you could use it to copy and paste the information into the second page if you are going to just add text to the page as regular content.

Olivia

Justin says:

July 9th, 2007 at 12:18 pm star

It sounds like their could be some great uses for this feature, but I can't quite get a grasp on how it works. For example, if I wanted to implement a standard footer on all of our pages (with links to our home page and site map) how would this be applied? If you can only do it when first setting up a page, are there any uses for the feature for sites where all pages are already setup? Perhaps a video tutorial would help us all with this feature.

Thanks,
Justin

Olivia says:

July 9th, 2007 at 12:31 pm star

Hi Justin,

If you already have a site with pages set up then this tool won't do much good in your main content area. For that kind of issue, you can use the Share Frame Content paste function found on your toolbar. This will allow you to copy one frame at a time and paste it to another page so that if you ever makes changes to that frame on any page it will make the same change to content on the other pages.

If you have multiple content areas, then you could use Manage Content Areas to mass paste items such as your logo, or mailing address under the site menu, or any number of items that will appear in semi static areas of your site.

Olivia