Designs¶
A design is the shell of a portal. It holds one or more layouts, the theme they use, and any parameters and data sources that every page on a layout shares. Think of it as the part of a website that stays the same from page to page: the navigation, the header, the footer and the colours.
A portal picks a design when it is created. You can move it to another design later. Several portals can share one design, which is how a company keeps all its portals looking alike.
The Portal Designs list¶
Open Designs in the Portals app. The list shows each design's name, description, theme, version number and status. Tick Show archived to also see versions that have been replaced by a newer published one.
From the list you can:
- Add new design. You are asked for a Name and a Theme. The design starts as a draft with no layouts.
- Edit a design, or double-click its row, to open the design editor.
- Duplicate a design. You get a new, unpublished design named … (copy) with every layout and its data sources and parameters, on the same theme. Portals keep using the original until you switch them.
- Delete a design. This is refused while any portal is still pinned to one of its versions.
The design editor¶
The editor has a left panel, a ribbon and the canvas. The left panel has two tabs:
| Tab | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Page Layouts | The design's layouts as a tree. Add creates a top-level layout. Right-click a layout for Add sub-layout and Delete. Drag a layout onto another to nest it, or between rows to reorder. See Layouts and Sub-layouts |
| Elements | The widget tree of the layout you have selected |
The ribbon has three tabs:
| Tab | What is there |
|---|---|
| Home | Undo and Redo, the clipboard, the Bind toggle and the widget library |
| Layout | The selected layout's Name and Parent Layout, and its Parameters and Data Sources. See What a layout can share |
| Design | The design's Name, Theme and Description, and the version controls: Publish, Discard, New version, Unpublish and Versions. See Versions and Publishing |
Select a layout in the tree to show it on the canvas. Everything you place there belongs to the layout and appears on every page based on it. The only exception is what sits inside a content placeholder. Those regions are filled by each page.
Changing the theme¶
Pick another theme under Design → Theme. Themes are not versioned, so the change shows immediately in every portal on the design, published ones included, as soon as the design is saved. Only the design's structure waits for a publish.
Who can edit designs¶
Editing needs the Portal Designs permission. With read access only, the editor opens with a Read-only access notice and nothing can be changed. See Access Control.