Rock U - Content Management - Content Channel View

Transcribed Video Content

In prior videos, you've seen how to set up your content channels. Now, we'll show you how to get that content out there on the Internet to actually be viewed. So we're gonna start on our external website here, and we're gonna check out the blog item. This page lists the content channel items for the blog, which would be individual blog posts. And it relies on a very powerful block called the content channel view block. So if we check out the block settings for that, up at the top, you'll pick the the channel that it is that you're viewing. There's also a status, pending, approved, denied. And then there's the format. And this is how the display on the page that we just saw is driven. And, actually, let's take a closer look at that. So this is the Lava file that's driving the format that we saw on the blog's page. It looks a little bit more complicated than it is. So for instance, down here, we're gonna we're gonna kind of ignore this stuff. This just has to do with pagination. If there's more items on the page than can go on the page, then you'll get a a next page and a previous page, and, that's all that all this controls. So we don't really need to worry about that. Up here at the top, this is assigning the item link, which gets used to determine what the URL should be when you click the the read more button, from the blog page. So, really, the meat of what we're seeing on the page, is is in here. We have the item's title. And by the way, it'll do this for each item. So for each content channel item in the list of items, it's gonna show the title. Then it's gonna show the summary, which is an attribute. And then we have our our read more button, that we talked about before. And if we go back to the page, you'll see that's exactly what we see. We have our title, and then we have our summary, and then a read more button. Let's go back to the block settings. So, again, there's our format. It's driven by the lava that we just saw. Down below, we have the items per page, and that's just how many content channel items should be shown on each page before that, pagination kicks in if needed. Then we have the item and output cache durations. Caching just helps speed up loading the content items, but you do have to make sure that there's no personalized lava, or else you definitely don't wanna cache it. Down below, we have cache tags, which haven't been configured for this instance. But if you did have cache tags configured, they'd appear here, and you can select which ones apply. That's a whole other topic that we cover in our designing and building websites using Rock Guide. Then over to the right, have the option to set the page title. And that'll set the page title to, in this case, the name of the, channel. And that'll become the the page title. You can choose to merge content. And if you do, what it'll is, it'll run it'll first run the content through the liquiding liquid templating engine to see if you actually have lava inside your content channel that you want to be displayed. Down below is the detail page, and so that's the page that people will be taken to, to view the individual content channel items. We have the enable tag list, which relates to tags. And if you enable this, it's kind of an advanced feature. You'll get an item tag list Lava merge field that'll let you use the tags in Lava. We also have enable archive summary. And, again, this is kind of another advanced feature. And when you enable it, you'll get an archive summary collection. And what this allows you to do is to create a summary of content channel items grouped by month and year, and that lets you keep content channel items on your site for people to be able to access, but without prominently featuring them on a page. You can set up a little content channel item archive. Then down below, we have the filter. And so you can add filter logic to this block. , maybe you only wanna show items if the summary contains a certain word or only show items that have an image. You can add filters here. Below that, we have enable query or route parameter filtering. This is an addition to the filters above, and this says to go to the URL and look through the query string and look for things that could be filters, such as an item parameter, to say which item to show. Then you have the order items by. And in this case, we have it ordered by the start date ascending, but you can order them by a variety of options. And that'll just sort the content channel items. And then you have the social media settings. So, , this is for if you're doing RSS discovery, you'll wanna, enable this. The meta description attribute is telling it which property is gonna have the meta description. And if you want to add an image into your meta tags on the page, then you can tell it what image to use. And that's it for the content channel view block. Next, if we navigate out of here, let's check out the watch page. And this is another, content channel view block, and we can pull that up here and see that it's a content channel view block just the one that we looked at. It's just configured a little bit differently, and it uses different lava to, to display it, as you can see. But we'll drill down into the Moneywise content channel item. And this uses the content channel item view block. And if we look at the block settings for content channel item view, you can see it starts with the content channel. So we're identifying the content channel that that this item is coming from. We also have its status, whether it's pending, approved, or denied. And then you have the lava template that drives, how it appears. And this one is a little this one is a little bit more complex, but, ultimately, you'll still see some familiar things the item's content and, , things that. Down below, we have the visitor settings, which are pretty basic. You can choose to log an interaction, for the current content channel item if you want. You can also choose to launch a workflow, when the content is being viewed. And we have more details on on the workflow in our designing and building websites using Rock Guide. Below the visitor settings, we have social media settings. And and this whole section, it lets you link any item attributes that you added to the channel to to special meta tags on the page. And so, you can specify an attribute for the Facebook title that might be different from the Twitter Twitter title, or maybe you want a different image for Facebook than you do for Twitter, you can identify, those attributes here. And then down below in the advanced settings, we have the custom query parameter, which, just it says in the help text, this will be which URL parameter up there in the in the URL to use to determine which content channel item to show. And so you can use for instance, you could pass it an integer or a string or a GUID, but this will drive which item should show, based off your query string. Then down below, you have a detail page. And given that this is the content channel item view block, this detail page here will probably only be used if you have child content items, which, in this case, we do. And we have another video for parent child relationships with content channels. So if you haven't seen that yet, check it out. But this will just tell us where the detail page is as we drill down. Then you have the output and item cache durations. So, again, you can also specify whether the output and the item content itself is cached to speed up page loads. Again, you don't wanna do this if there's any, personalized content. Then we have the cache tags, which there aren't any configured, but if you had some, you could select which ones apply down here. Again, our, designing and building websites manual has details on cache tags and setting those up. This option determines whether or not that you're gonna set the page title based on the content channel item's title, and we have that enabled here. So, the the the page title will be whichever content channel item we're looking at. And then last but not least, you have merge content. Enabling this will result in the content data and attribute values to be merged. And that's the content channel item view block. However, you don't always have to follow this same pattern of content channel view, content channel item view. So here we're in the Lava documentation, and we're looking at the text filters area. And this is actually a content channel view block. And each of the text filters are actually content channel items. So we are viewing content channel items on a content channel view block. And if we look at the block settings for this, we can see that this is, a content channel view block just the one that we looked at earlier. There's some filters and things that, but it's basically the same. The the main difference is gonna be in the lava that's being used to render the items on the page. But, if you were to look deeply at that, you'd find that these items use the familiar properties that, that we were used to seeing in some of the other, Lava that we were looking at. So we have our content channel item title. We have the summary, which is an attribute. And then we have additional attributes for the content channel item that show the the inputs and the outputs and stuff that down here. So this is really just the content channel view block, but with some lava to to show all of the items, listed on one page without needing a detail page to go to. So as you look around your website and if you see structured content, kinda what we saw with the lava page example, you should be thinking to yourself, this is a a good use case for the content channel view block. For more information, check out our designing and building websites using Rock Guide posted to the community website, and thanks for watching.