Example - Child Area
Most recent blog content.
Suppose you want a blog list page to be prepended with the some actual content from the most recent post.
This is an ideal application for the Child Area Content Source.
A blog list page would usually be implemented using a Page List block. We can place a UCP block before the Page List block and use the Child Area Content Source, using similar parent page, filtering and source order settings to those in the Page List so that the Child Area cource looks at the same set of child pages as the Page List. Then simply set the set the Nth Child to 1 and the pulled area to Main.
As for the Common Sidebars example, for a Content Transform, you will either simply Pass Through the source, or perhaps pick part of it or remove some unwanted classes using the Selector transform. If you want to maintain some HTML formatting, the Content Display is again a simple Plain output.
If you only want text, the Limited Text content display makes things much easier at this stage. Just limit the text as required and everything discussed below becomes much simpler.
To maintain HTML formatting from the source there is a bit more to do in the content source dialog. As it stands, you will end up pulling the entire Main area of the most recent blog article. Perhaps you want that. If not, you will need to home in on just the content you want. You can make this a lot simpler by enforcing that blog posts follow a structure, such as 2+ content blocks, the first for the introductory summary thenthen subsequent blocks for the actual meat of the post. You can also require blog authors to wrap the summary text in a class.
The first solution is to use use slicing and/or filtering in the Child Area source to get just the block or blocks you want by position or name. For example, if the post has a Page Title block followed by some Content blocks, you may wnat to slice 0,2 to get just the first 2 blocks. As one of these is a Page Title block, you will also need to set the context to be that of the target page.
An alternative would be to use the Selector transform to pick out just the part of the post you want using a css selector. Or perhaps a combination of the two.
The key point to remember for the future is that any filtering, slicing or selecting configured into UCP requires that all posts follow the structure conventions necessary to facilitate that filtering, slicing or selecting.
But c5Magic doesn't have a blog...
Never mind, the principle is the same for any page. Rather than pull the first child of a blog we can pull the most recent addon documented on this site to demonstrate the same principle.
Using the Child Area content source, the 'parent 'source page is Addons, sorted by most recent, and the Nth Child is 1. So we are looking at Home > Addons > *immediate-children* and within that just the first page listed.
The list of pulled blocks in the area is sliced 0,4 to grab just the first few blocks and filtered to just content blocks.
So you can distinguish it from the rest of the page, its wrapped in a success alert through the concrete5 block design menu.
An attribute to display content pulled with Universal Content Puller.
Universal Content Puller Attribute is an extension for Universal Content Puller and requires Universal Content Puller v9.0.3 to be installed. Once installed, a UCP Stored Setting attribute type will be available for Collections/Pages. This attribute type selects from previously stored Universal Content Puller settings and renders the pulled content when the attribute type is displayed.
The UCP Stored Setting attribute type has a minimal edit form to work with previously stored Universal Content Puller settings. Settings can be stored using the Export button from any Universal Content Puller block or global settings edit dialogue and then selecting the Save to store option. This will create or update a stored setting (setting names must be at least 5 characters).
All such stored settings are then available for selection with a UCP Stored Setting attribute. The attribute form provides a simple select between all previously stored Universal Content Puller settings.
When a UCP Stored Setting attribute is displayed, the selected Universal Content Puller settings are evaluated and the pulled content displayed.
In its simplest form, this can be the core Attribute Display block, but you can use a UCP Stored Setting attribute in any other places you would display an attribute.
Considerations on use
- Universal Content Puller's Ajax rendering is disabled. Pulled content is rendered immediately.
- Pagination within pulled content is disabled. Where pulled content would have been paginated, the first page is shown.
- If content display requires JavaScript assets to be loaded, for example, to show a chart, the block cache for any displaying block must be disabled (in Advanced settings of the edit mode menu) to allow the attribute view to load the assets.
- When using the core Attribute Display block, multi-line formatting must be 'none'. Alternatively, use the Raw template bundled with this package.
- The UCP Stored Setting attribute type can be used with categories other than Collection/Page, such as Express and Users, but is not enabled for such during installation. See Dashboard > System & Settings > Attributes > Types.
As a digression, lets think about how this could become dangerous. If we had gone one level deeper or listed 'All Children' in the child list, we could have ended up with this page. A page referencing itself could get us into a recursive loop.
One mitigation is that we slice the blocks and are only working with the first paragraph, so we don't get far enough down the page to render the above UCP block.
Also to note is that UCP includes recursion detection by keeping a list/stack of the 'signature' of currnetly rendering UCP blocks.
For comparison, here is the same content pulled, but displayed with Limited Text at approximately 200 characters. Note how it is now without styles inside it because its text only without HTML.
Below is a Page List of 1 to provide a link back to where the above Universal Content Puller blocks are currently pulling from. This is for your convenience to click back and check the examples above.
(At the time of writing, that is from the main documentation page for Universal Content Puller, but in the future that will change as further addons are documented on this site)
