With Universal Content Puller installed, your first stop should be to visit the dashboard plugins page at Dashboard > Stacks & Blocks > Universal Content Puller > Plugins.
Use the list filters to show Content Sources, Content Transforms and Content Display in turn and use the (i) icon to expand the built in documentation. Familiarise yourself with the available sources, transforms and displays.
Don't try an understand everything at this stage. Think of a use-case that is applicable to your site or project and focus on the capabilities that are close to that. If your use-case is close to one of the examples here, the setup can be even easier - just copy the settings from these pages!
We have a video just about copying block settings below.
For example, perhaps your first use case is one of:
If the sidebar includes context dependant blocks such as a Page Title, Autonav, Page List or Attribute Display, you need to decide what context thos blocks are rendered in. In the context of where they are pulled from, or the page that is pulling them. You can make the choice in a pair of radio buttons in the source dialog.
You may also simply decide to omit some blocks from the pulled content, by slicing the list of blocks or filtering the list to include or exclude by block type or block name.
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. For example, on the sidebar to the right the Selector transform has been used to remove wrapping container and row classes.
The Content Display is simple, all the work has already been done so its a Plain output.
Finally, in the Advanced tab you probably want to either have no sanitization - None, or Safe.
You won't need to enable any AJAX loading. If there is nothing rapidly changing or interactive in the sidebar you may want to speed things up by switching on the block cache.
The above notes Parent Area for Common Sidebars are pulled from the page Example - Common Sidebar using UCP source Page Area with a Selector transform to remove classes and Plain display. Read in more detail...
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.
The above notes Most recent blog content are pulled from the page Example - Child Area using UCP source Page Area with a Selector transform to remove classes and Plain display. Read in more detail...
If the CSV contains more rows or columns than you want, the CSV transform can slice it by rows and or columns. You may need to adjust the csv options in the transform if the source does not followm the usual conventions. Finally, you may also want to transpose it, rotating rows and columns.
In the Table display dialog you can select what to use for row and column headings and filter out rows or columns you don't want to actually display. For example, if you are using the first row for column headings, you will aslo want to filter that row from the table body.
If you run into difficulties with the transformed csv data, the Serialize content display can be used to display the raw data as a php dump or as JSON.
If its a big table, it can optionally be paginated using the pagination settings in the Table dialog.
The above notes CSV as a Table are pulled from the page Example - CSV Data using UCP source Page Area with a Selector transform to remove classes and Plain display. Read in more detail...
Creating a sidebar for a group of pages without messing about with stacks is an easy use-case for Universal Content Puller.
This sidebar is edited once, within the main addon page for Universal Content Puller.
It is then pulled into all UCP sub-pages using a UCP block.
The Content Source is Parent Page, set to pull the Sidebar area from 2 pages from the top. The Content Transform is Selector, set to remove container and row classes that, when unnecessarily nested, could mess up the Bootstrap grid. The Content Display is Plain, which just outputs the transformed text.
In the advanced settings, sanitization is disabled as we trust the source page and don't want to strip out any formatting or functionality from the pulled sidebar.