Two design questions in one day… it's all doing my head in!
I know I can apply a different design using [font="Courier New"]?SQ_DESIGN_NAME=blah[/font]
Can I get that same functionality from a URL lookup?
I know I can apply a paint layout using URL lookups, that is not what I need.
Maybe time to download the latest design manual and try really hard to read some of it!!
The design is based on URL by inheriting from the parent asset.
a (design I)
-b (design I from a and design II from c)
c (design II)
-b (design I from a and design II from c)
[quote]
The design is based on URL by inheriting from the parent asset. (…)[/quote]
Thanks for the reply. I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you are talking about. Could you please provide something more specific.
Yes sure. woowoowoo.
Here is the scenario. Asset B has been linked under both A and C, so it has two parents assets. A has been applied Design I and C has been applied Design II, thus asset B has two designs inherited from A and C.
I think the basic premise is that you can have 2 different sites with the content from both linked under each site, but a different design applied to each. There are several challenges with that approach, the most notable being it becomes almost impossible to apply a design customisation to a specific area of a site - and the obvious challenges of managing linked content, especially if the site grows large, or editors don't fully understand the concept of linked content.
To date, we've only managed this with the query string you have mentioned, although there may be more changes on the horizon.
What you can also do is when you provide a link to switch the design, additionally use SQ_ACTION=set_design_name - that will hold the design for the duration of the visitors session.
Anthony,
thanks for that. I had a feeling that the linked content idea might be OK in some circumstances, but we're dealing with a growing site that contains a fair bit of dynamically generated content and a variety of paint layouts - makes my head spin just thinking about the problems we might encounter! Still, might give it a little go, just to see what happens!
That "something" on the horizon sounds like my only hope for now 
Thanks for pointing out the downside of this method Anthony, the user should not apply customisation or design to that multiple linked asset as the root node. For customisations I think there are several ways to limit its usage for instance using dynamic assets(asset listing) to replace menu area or other sort of static text or images. My questions is if using the method of SQ_ACTION=set_design_name, does it work fine with the reverse proxy like squid?