Can't put DIV back under construction

Squiz Matrix Support
1

When I create a DIV it automatically has a status of underconstruction… makes sense. But once it's live, there is no way to put it back under construction… it seems to always inherit the status of the parent asset. Sometimes we want to take a DIV down while we make changes to it… or even remove it temporarily and put it back up again later. They only way we've been able to remove a div from a page is to delete it.


Is this the way it should work?

2

Bodycopy DIV assets have their own Details page, where you can change the status of the DIV specifically. Just expand the Standard Page asset and the Page Contents asset to expose the Bodycopy Div assets in the Asset Map.

3

Thanks, but I know all that…


Regardless, I can't seem to put an individual DIV back under construction. I'm on the DIV's Details page, the parent page is "Live", and I'm trying to change the status of the DIV only to anything but "Live", but it just won't change.



Try it… we're on version 3.4.0

4

I just tried it on your sandbox installation and can confirm that the div's status is always the same as the parent page status ONLY when the parent page status is live. If the parent page is archived / under construction the child div can change to anything.


Edit: Played with it a little bit more, and made the parent page "archived". I could then make the div whatever status I wanted; I think it needs some more playing around with.

5

And is this the way it's supposed to work?

6

To be honest I doubt it, can one of the developers confirm?

7

This is by design.
A dependant asset is not allowed to set its status to a lower level than its parent.



If a page is live, the only status a bodycopy DIV would be allowed to have would be those statuses greater than live (safe edit, safe edit pending approval and safe edit approved to go live).



The order of statuses is:

Archived

Under Construction

Pending Approval

Approved

Live

Safe Editing

Safe Editing Pending Approval

Safe Editing Approved



If the parent page is Under Construction, the DIVs can be Live, but not Archived.

8

For the simple fact that we want to be able to keep a page live whilst temporarily removing a div, is there any chance this could be changed?

9

You could move the div out to a temporary "holding" page for that. I do that a lot.

10

Does that seem like a bit of a hack to you? It just seems odd to me that you can't temporarily disable a div by simply changing its status. I think it's also a usability problem… if you can't change the div's status to anything else when the parent asset is live, then why provide those options?

11

Something else you can do is change the permission on that DIV (i.e. remove Public read). That would have the same effect.

12

I like this a little better. Still… very difficult to teach a distributed publishing environment these "tricks".

13

I've been thinking about this, and really, the work-arounds are too hard to teach a group of distributed publishers who have a hard enough time remembering how some of the most basic things work in Matrix.


I think you should be able to put a dependent asset under construction if the parent is live… so I'm interested in the thinking behind the rules that say you can't give a dependent asset a lower status than its parent, please.



And, I've no doubt got DIVs that are live while the parent isn't… but right now I can't think why that should be possible either.

14

Multi-linking is the catch.


Consider a DIV linked on multiple pages, all of which are LIVE. The DIV is also LIVE. If one of those pages is placed UNDER CONSTRUCTION, the DIV will also go UNDER CONSTRUCTION because of dependant asset status rules. This would actually drop it off all the other pages it exists on.



This is one reason why there is a rule that defines that the DIV can not be set to a status lower than its dependant parents, and it is alsso why you can have a LIVE DIV on an UNDER CONSTRUCTION page.

15

The second part of this makes more sense to me than the first. I'm not that interested in putting a page back to UNDER CONSTRUCTION… just a DIV. And, if I was removing it from one page, I guess I'd want it removed from all the pages it appears on (one senario might be some information that has suddenly become controversial, so we want to take it down, but not trash it in case we want to put it back up again at a later date).


Therefore, what if you want to temporarily remove the linked DIV from all those LIVE pages simulateneously, but keep the rest of the page LIVE. What are the options?



So far we have:


  • Move the DIV to another area, and then put it under construction.
  • Change the permissions so that it's not public read (in fact you'd have to change it so that noone but site administrators could read it, I guess).



    Are there any other options that might be easier to teach a whole bunch of people who won't be using Matrix regularly, and won't be interested in remembering "tricks".