Let's Visit Page Builders

The page builders need a lot of work.

How the columns are named is just a software glitch. Cheetah does not actually care. A column or row does not actually exist until there is a block in it and that is because (your right) columns are not actually recorded in the database. If you were for example to create new page with a bunch of columns and only add blocks to two of those columns, when you refresh the page in the page builders, the only two columns you will see are the ones that you put the blocks in.

How they are doing it is stupidly simple, but creates a bunch of problems. When the page is rendered the script uses the fields Column, Order and ColWidth.  Width determines if it's a full width column. Any column that has a Width of 100 is treated as a full width column.

Simple process, fine for rendering while displaying the page, but creates problems in the page builder. One you pointed out, the names of the columns.

Another is you can't control where a new column appears when you click the add column button.  Another big problem is if all you have on the page is one column that is full width, you cannot add any columns that are not full width. The slider to change the width of the columns is no longer there.

So yes, i am aware of a number of issues in the page builders that i need to deal with. And thanks for the tip on calling the full width ones rows.

I added a cover module to groups and noticed that I had two column 1s.  This caused me a bit of a problem as I tried to understand how columns work.  My problem came from a lack of understanding of just how Cheetah handles columns.  I went to the database but didn't see where Cheetah understands about columns on a page.  You go to the sys_page_compose and it just has which column a block is in, 1, 2, 3 and so forth and the order it should fall inside of that column.  So if I insert a full width column and it is column 1 and there is another column 1 on the page, how does Cheetah know which column to put the block in when it renders the page?  There must be something else keeping track of full width columns that I don't know about.  Which brings me to the following:

1, A full width column is actually a ROW and should have been called a row when Boonex added it to Dolphin.  I don't know why Boonex was so bad with such things but they were.   It would help if Cheetah renamed full width column to row

2, There is a default row that is in built in; when you go to page builders and add a column, you are adding a column to a row.

3, When you add a full width column, which is actually a row, you can't add columns to that row.  It would be nice; it would give a lot more power to page layouts (at least on the desktop).

We could change the nomenclature a bit in the builders.  The page builders should list the default hidden row as Row 0; it isn't currently displayed in page builders but it is there because you have to have a row to insert the columns.  Let's show that row when we go to page builders.  Then when we insert rows (currently called full width columns), they should be listed as Row 1, Row 2, Row 3...

In the screenshot I am including, you can see that I have two column 2s; of course the full width column is actually a row.