Studio sandbox area to work on building a skin

Hi mlombard,

 

if you are looking at a studio way of doing this, then you could take advance of the functionality in Admin which allows you setting up a different skin for a certain node. What you could do is to create a sandbox category (or more than one) and have the new skin assigned to that node and all of it subnodes. 

 

In this way you / others with appropriate access should be able to edit the CSS and the wrapper (along with the other skin properties) without interfering with the main community. It is also possible to hide the "sandbox category" from the standard hierarchy and navigation so it does not even appear there.

 

Thanks,

Yeah isolating the theme to a set node works but has serious limitations with viewing other pages like user profiles etc.

CSS and assets aren't difficult to do, there are browser plugins that allow you to inject your own JS and CSS into a page client side, but it pages and layouts that can't be easily done.

We've setup custom pages to test new page layouts without holding stage up, so existing publishing can still go out, however it's not always possible given most builtin components need correct page context.

I'd like to see a way to setup a draft page XML and layout XML and have this render using a version=preview style parameter. As I understand it the backend does hold version history for each XML file so the data is there just need to create a way to flag the active version for normal stage access and publishing and a way to fetch draft / new versions for previewing.

Hi Chris,

 

this sound like a great idea to raise in our ideas board. As you mention the changes you do in Studio are versioned and as such there may be an easy way to achieve this - I am sure the product gurus would be happy to hear your feedback here and have a chance to review it - although they also check the developer board quite frequently it's probably more visible in the ideas board.

 

Many Thanks