Expand the editor content area

Some of content stacks get smaller and thinner that it become difficult to select or work in even with all the tool sidebar closed.

is there a trick to temporary expand those area to work within it in the editor?

Often, I had to take some stacks out of the content and work with it then place it back inside another content so I am wondering if there a tip or trick working with those contents within other contents or selecting it to make changes in the inspection settings?

Thank you

The best trick is to hide the sidebars and make the window as large as possible.

It’s not a simple “fix” to change this, but we’ll definitely be addressing this limitation in future versions of Stacks too.

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Even with all sidebar hidden, still cannot really edit the contents. I still have to pul it out and place it on the bottom of the editor or in another opened RW project to edit it then put it back.

Hopefully, a solution will be found in the future version but this method is working out for now. I was just wondering if there was a trick or tip to editing those stacks inside several other stacks.

Screenshot with all sidebars closed on a 27 inch monitor.

@isaiah It would definitely be great to “fix” this. More and more of us use Foundry and Foundation. When you use a “container” stack the width of a section may be set to only be 700 or 960 or 1200 pixels wide. This results in a lot of unused space on the RW screen: even on a 27" iMac.

I have no idea how to deal with this, but it might be nice to have the ability to set the width of any container but that width NOT be previewed within RW editing, but only on RW preview/publish. For me that would resolve over 99% of the viewing/entry problems.

I agree with @Mathew

It would be cool to have some way to disable / enable width preview in editor expanding the stacks outward some more giving us more spaces to work in.

In Site Styles you can set it to be Unlimited Width. It’s a checkbox. If you don’t want to your site that way, you will need to disable this before you publish. I will rethink this in the next major release of Foundation.

while i can assure you there is an eventual fix for this in S4 (because i just checked in the code two days ago, yeah!!!) it will be a while before that gets here.

i can see the problem in your case is not screen real estate or sidebars; you have a huge screen and no sidebars at all. the problem in your case is a VERY complicated layout with many many nested components inside of a column that is only a fraction of the width of the window.

but there is a trick that you could play:

try making a partial just for that column. you won’t be using any of the features of a partial at all – BUT when you double click it that column will open up in the partial editor and fill the full width of the screen – so no more narrow column!

also: using partials on heavily nested pages will radically increase the amount of caching Stacks can do. in some cases it will increase the speed of Edit mode significantly – and at worst it won’t impact speed at all – so nothing to lose!

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I use BWD Blueprint One for my site layout.

In several of my web development, I set different width and alignment for each breakpoints and the web design is not influenced by site style width setting even if I set it at unlimited unless I set the size below than what the Blueprint One is set at.

It would be nice to have a stack tree-view. Even stacks inside other already narrow stacks would be “visible” or choosable for editing. And if you choose one from the tree-view, you should be able to edit that stack with everything inside in a new “window” like in a partials window.

This is why I added the page wide controls to many of my stacks.

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The Hide All Margins and Padding is a shared page wide control so any single instance can turn it on and off for all Sections on the page.

I also have a Stack in Edit Mode for various column based stacks including BluePrint Sidebar.

I will add the margin/padding collapse to BluePrint ONE as you mention it, that one escaped the process somehow.

“it might be nice to have the ability to set the width of any container but that width NOT be previewed within RW editing”

I’m not sure that’s something I can tackle. It seems like it would have to be very specifically tailored to each stack’s use-case.

I do encourage stack-developers to consider making Edit mode LESS WYSIWYG – that is to just let each stack behave like a default box and to NOT apply the stacks’s CSS and layout. It tends to make data entry a bit easier, even if it doesn’t look as pretty. It’s sort of a form follows function kind of a tradeoff.

I’m going to encourage this even more emphatically in the future and also see if there is anything I can do in the API and UX to help stack developer do that easier (easier for both devs AND the user).

And of course if you have suggestions, please shoot them my way. Sometimes even when I don’t implement exact suggestions - they give me the seed of an idea that grows into something great. So please keep them coming. :smiley:

AND

As far as edit the text in those narrow columns. Consider it a solved problem. The edit field will be a bit nicer in Stacks 4 – and will always provide a nice amount of space for editing. No more tiny editors. Yeah!

I just need to hurry up and finish Stacks 4. Hopefully not too much longer. I have a couple more big features to do – so hopefully sometime in 2018.

Isaiah

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Thanks for your continued great work Isaiah! Your drive to Stacks4 and your involvement in the forums are very much appreciated.

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