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Getting Started

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!

Easy Setup

  1. On this site find an example similar to what you require, click the View settings button, copy the settings JSON.
  2. On your page, add a block. On the Support tab click the button to Import settings, paste the settings JSON and import. 
  3. On the advanced tab, clear the setting that enables the export button with the block view. You probably don't want to show that on the front end of your site!
  4. Edit the settings to what you require. Most importantly, in the Content Source tab, adjust any concrete5 Page, File or User Selection as IDs will change between sites.

We have a video just about copying block settings below.

For example, perhaps your first use case is one of:

  1. A set of common sidebars for each region of your site, in the same way as UCP has been used to provide a common sidebar for these documentation pages. 
  2. You want a blog list page to be prepended with the first content block of the most recent post.
  3. You have some CSV files you would like to show as tables.

Parent Area for Common Sidebars

Suppose you need set of common sidebars for each region of your site. One way to do it sould be to create a stack for each common sidebar. Another would be to create custom page templates and add them to your theme. Both of those can be a bit fiddly for editors to manage

The UCP solution is what you can see on the sidebar to the right, implementing a common sidebar for these UCP documentation pages. 

The Content Sources you would most likely consider for this are Parent Area or Page Area. This is a fairly simple application, just configure the content source for the page that has the master copy of the sidebar, and set the area to Sidebar.

This Example

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...

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 form 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.

This Example

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...

CSV as a Table

You have some CSV files you would like to show as tables. For a content source, you can either pull the file as a URL or file path using the URL source, or upload the file to the concrete5 File Manager and pull from the there using the File source.

The choice of Content Transform is CSV.

Content Display will usually be Table because that is optimised for tabular display, though you may also want to consider Multi Level List which also has table output capabilities.

This Example

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...

Additional Pages

About this Sidebar

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.

View settings