Explaining Shared Components and Shared Slots

Nevertheless, both content slot types can be populated individually with new components or by reusing existing ones, the latter being so-called shared components. Shared components are visualized on the UI by a chain link icon:

Management of shared components offers substantial time savings compared to individual nonshared components.

Let’s say, Laura has modified a shared component. To sync it, she can conveniently synchronize any slot hosting this component. Why? Because the shared component exists only once in the staged catalog version. Synchronizing this single component instance affects all related slots in the online catalog simultaneously.

In Advanced Edit mode, we can manage components on "template level" by using shared slots. These slots belong to the template. A component added to a shared slot of a template shows up on all pages derived from the template, showing this shared slot. Typical examples of components living in a shared slot and thus present on many pages are the company logo or the search box. This feature is powerful and, therefore, typically restricted to more experienced users.

Let’s look at a video covering the management of shared components and how to use and synchronize shared slots:

Laura can’t directly access templates in SmartEdit. Instead, when she creates a page, she chooses the template from which her new page is to inherit page slots and shared slots. By adding a component to a shared content slot on her page, this component "logically" belongs to the template. It will now implicitly show up on all pages derived by this template in the past, present and even in the future.

Shared component in page content slots:

A shared component can be added to different page slots on several pages–literally everywhere, even derived from different templates. If Laura wants to populate 10 locations, she has to manually add this component 10 times, but any change to this shared component will affect all 10 locations instantly.

Nonshared component in a shared slot:

Adding a non-shared component once to a shared slot in a template will make it appear instantly on all pages derived from that template. Any change to this non-shared component will also affect all related shared slot locations simultaneously.

As previously mentioned, synchronization of page content slots is supported by the context menu of the slot itself, but also on the Page Structure tree as well as the Sync panel. This is of course only possible if the page status is Ready to Sync.

Synchronization of shared content slots is also supported by the slot's context menu and the Page Structure tree, and is fully independent of the current page status!

Why? Because shared slots logically belong to the template and are only "shown" on all pages derived from that template. Thus, they aren't even listed on the "page scoped" Sync panel.

See some of the different synchronization options provided:

1. Shared slots, by Page Structure tree
2. Page slots by Page Structure tree or via Sync panel
3. Synchronization directly available on shared or page slot itself

By now, we know page slots and shared slots, but there is a third type of content slot:

SmartEdit’s Advanced Edit mode allows the conversion of a shared into a non-shared content slot. This newly created non-shared content slot replaces the shared content slot on the current page. You can think of it as being placed on top of the shared content slot so that the content of the shared content slot isn’t displayed on that page anymore.

This allows Laura to hide the content of the former shared slot on that page and replace it with content she prefers. When she converts a shared slot, the non-shared slot becomes part of the current page and can’t be used in any other page.

Let's take a real-life example:

Laura must replace the company logo, located in the shared logo slot, but the replacement only affects the home page. Converting the shared slot on the homepage to a brand-new non-shared slot is the best option.

The following diagram illustrates the process started either from the Page Structure tab or the shared logo slot itself:

Laura successfully replaced the home page shared logo slot with a brand-new non-shared slot, visualized by the "non-shared slot" icon.

She also decided to ‘Remove all’ previous components. Now, the new slot is empty and ready to be populated with a different logo. As seen in the previous diagram, two alternative options were also available:

• 'Use existing,' where the components remain the same as in the shared slot. This results in every component in the slot becoming a shared component because it is used in at least two slots.
• 'Clone all,' which creates an independent copy of every component from the shared slot in the newly converted non-shared slot.

The following image shows how Laura could now add components to the empty non-shared slot:

1. Add components to an empty non-shared slot
2. New icon indicates this is a non-shared slot

Non-shared content slots can be synchronized like a regular page slot: Either in the Sync panel or by using the Page Structure Tree.

Laura could revert the non-shared slot back to the previous shared slot by clicking on the "non-shared slot" icon. It's provided on the border of the slot itself as well as on in the page structure tab.

Let’s see where Laura can revert the non-shared slot back to the original shared slot:

SmartEdit’s Advanced Edit mode allows the cloning of the current page. That results in the creation of a new page based on the configuration of the current page, applying the same template, components, and layout.

Laura only needs to press the Clone button, which opens the dialog ‘Clone Page’.

It allows her to either reuse the original components, which implicitly results in making them shared components. Or alternatively, clone them, resulting in new and independent copies of the original components.