Pages vs. Templates

[pattern-lab]

Pages vs. Templates

[bradfrost]

I agree, and meant to bring that up earlier.

The way it should work is that pages should be able to take just a .json
file. That will work for a few use cases and keep thing DRY.

But there are a lot of instances where the page's markup will differ from
the main template. It would be cool to control all variations (for example,
a homepage page instance where there's an emergency, or during a live
event, or some other special edition) with JSON, but I can see how that
could end up being cumbersome. So I still think it would be valuable to be
able to create .mustache files for pages.

On Sunday, October 27, 2013, Dave Olsen wrote:

Should Pages have mustache-based mark-up? It seems like they really should
just be Templates (the base mark-up) with custom data (to make the
Pages more "real"). If that's the case then the only files that should
be in 04-pages/ should be the .json files. This would make PL a little
DRYer and make it easier to update Templates and Pages at the same time.

For example, the changes made when updating 03-templates/homepage.mustacheshould be seen when viewing templates

homepage or pages > homepage on the PL site.

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Brad Frost
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[dmolsen]

Ok, so we want a one-to-many relationship between Templates and Pages. And we might be able to "turn on" sections of a template with the JSON. For example, you could have a Template named homepage.mustache with this code:

<h1>Hello World</h1>
{{# emergency }}
   <div>Emergency!!!!!</div>
{{/ emergency }}
<div id="normal-news">
   [ normal stuff ]
</div>

And then have a default Page JSON for that template named homepage.json which was a vanilla data replacement looking like:

{
    "normal-news-items": [ stuff ]
}

With this data the emergency section of the homepage Template doesn't show when rendered because there's no emergency variable. To get the emergency version of the template we'd have a second Page JSON file, named homepage-emergency.json, which showed had the emergency variable:

{
    "emergency": true;
}

That's a way of giving Mustache the ability to handle a simple if statement. PL could use homepage.json as the base and then render Pages based on one or more related JSON files. By having homepage.json and homepage-emergency.json files we'd end up with two rendered Pages based on one Template.

I can keep the Pages support we have now too.