Hi Mark,
I’m not at my Mac now but I think you are asking about the pin that shows up on partials on the upper corner. That indicates the content is pinned to all pages that use that partial. while you are in the partial editor you have the option to un pin that content so you may change it to something different on each page.
Only some types of content like text have that option so the other stacks you see in your partial will not have then pin but will still show up on each page.
Hope this makes sense if I was at my Mac I would have given you some screen shots.
… and Mark (written after Doug’s useful comment) if all this still doesn’t “click” then I highly suggest contactiing Isaiah (the developer) directly. I’ll even tag him: @isaiah so he becomes aware of this post.
BTW this is a holiday in the U.S. But starting tomorrow Isaiah will probably get back to you. He not only made the product but is excellent at explaining how and why it works the way it does.
So Doug, I think that you are saying even though the non-text stacks do not show as pinned they will still show up on other pages where the partial is used. But what I want to know is if I change on of the images in the partial will that change be replicated in the other pages even though the image stack does not have a pin?
Coming in a bit late on this convo but, you’re correct that if you change one of those images in the partial, it should be reflected on all other instances that partial is used.
The pin allows you unpin that content, and change something on a single instance (not on all other partials).
As @teefers mentions, not all content comes with the ‘pinnable’ option. For those that dont, I believe you can put it inside a 1-column stack and that stack will come with a pin.
Yes if you change anything in a partial like an image, it will change that anywhere the partial is used.
The only exception to this is the content that is unpinned(assuming that content has that option).
Partials by default will pin content that can be unpinned. So unless you go into the partial and select the content to be unpinned, it will be the same any place you use it.
One think you may want to try is to set up a dummy project with multiple pages and play around with partials. They are very powerful addition to stacks 3.
I think the confusion here is in what is “pinnable/unpinnable” content.
In this case the stack in question a customer 3rd party stack where the images are configured in the info-sidebar. i.e. the images are part of the settings of the stack, not a part of the content.
This is a pretty subtle detail and for those that learn by example a little better, I made a video about what exactly is unpinnable:
content (text/images you add to the main edit area) CAN CHANGE in each use of a partial – to do that you unpin that content.
settings (stuff that you edit in the sidebar) CANNOT CHANGE in each use of a partial – they just stay the same everywhere.
But what if I want to change the settings
Watch the video. At the end I discuss using an unpinned one column stack to wrap around other content – that content can be completely unique to each partial instance.
But why is Stacks like this?
For simplicity. Sometimes powerful features decrease the ease of use of software and you have to eliminate some things to keep things usable by mere mortals like us. That’s the case here. Earlier similar features of Stacks 2 (like globals) allowed changing both content and settings. It becomes very complicated very quickly. This made the learning curve to using those features very steep.
As partials are better understood no by many users, I will likely add this feature back in (perhaps in a somewhat limited way) in the future if I can find a way that doesn’t complicate things too much.
Thanks all I think I finally got it. It was not so much the unpinning that was the problem, it was that the content did not appear to pinned to start with, but by dropping into a one column stack it seems to do the trick and works like I hoped it would.
Thanks again for all your help - this is a great feature and is going to save me a ton of work!
Isaiah - your video has shown me I can use partials to do even more than I was aiming for and will really make changes to my site easier to manage going forward - thanks!
@isaiah I am just learning to use partials on a website that has items for sale. I’ve tried to put the “add to cart” button in my partial but there is no way to “unpin it”. I want to set up the margins/colors, etc for the button but want to be able to change the item name and the price.
I wanted to watch the video that you give the link to above but the message I get is that the File is not available. Did you perhaps post the video on youtube? From @teefers comment I think I’ll try putting the cart button in a single column partial and see if that works.
Thank you all for your insights that I found doing a search on the forum.
When I first saw your post I was thinking Jan of this year not last year. Duh!
Anyhow maybe the question I should ask is, "Can you put an “Add to Cart” button in a partial. I tried putting it in a 1 column stack but still didn’t get the “pin”.
I have watched your video on Partials at Your Head many times but you don’t talk about the stacks that won’t work in partials. I will do more seaching.
Any type of stack can go into a partial. There are no exceptions. So even though I have no idea which “Add to Cart” stack you are referring to (because that’s not a built-in part of Stacks) I am quite positive you can put that stack into a partial.
However you cannot unpin a whole stack. You can only unpin the “content” of a stack. What’s content?
Any type of text (plain text, markdown, html, or styled text)
Any type of image
Any empty container (like a 1-Column stack)
An add-to-cart button will need to be configured with different setttings (not content) for each product. You’ll probably need to set the product ID or maybe the price, and probably a few other things too.
In effect, each of these add-to-cart buttons will be totally unique. So instead of putting them directly into the partial – the best way is just to add an empty 1-Column stacks (an empty container) and unpin it. This leaves a “Drop Stacks Here” space for you to place your add-to-cart button. And everything that you drop in will be completely editable, including all the properties.
I know that’s a lot of details and not all of it is probably clear just from reading, so I made a quick video (sorry if i talk way too fast – if i don’t the video ends up being GBs big and everyone hates me. ) But in the video I try to set up a simple (and someone ugly) product partial with a button added in the way i just described.
Here’s the video, please feel free to ask questions:
also: (it looks like DropBox changed all their policies on direct downloads of things like movies – so a lot of my old movie links on the forum have died. i still have all those videos, i’ll just need to upload them to my server and repost them. maybe a YouTube channel is in order? that seems to be what all the cool kids are doing these days.
@isaiah Imagine (as in your example) a set of pages all with same design, different content. The page could be made by one large partial (entire page) or a collection of several smaller partials. Outside of the obvious differences (partial management, flexibility, etc) , are there any “behind the scenes” positives/negatives to “one large partial” vs “several smaller partials.” ie: stack conflicts, RW project size, open/save speed, preview render speed, etc??? (Obviously- apart from the individual stacks characteristics within the partials.)
@1611mac - building pages as a single partial that gets used over and over again – sort of like a large theme – is definitely possible. i see it fairly often in fact.
but there is no significant pro/con in terms of storage, memory, or speed.
partials are stored once in a centralized location in your file – but the large bits (like images) have always been that way, so there if there is any difference it is probably a very small positive impact.
in terms of memory there is probably a pretty significant win in terms of what is stored and cached since partials live in a single location in memory. this is probably the biggest effect – and it’s a positive one.
in terms of speed there are pros and cons – but they are all small.
Pro: partial instances share caches
Nil: caches are flushed between pages – so a full page partial would see little
Con: after editing a partial the change has to be communicated to all instances (that have been loaded into memory).
Nil: this is very small and only becomes significant when you use a partial hundreds or thousands of times.
So… in the end I’d say the any effects are probably much smaller than the top-tier things that affect performance:
The lazy man’s guide to partials. I like devs to do my hard work so am a sucker for anything new. I certainly can’t us RW without partials. If you’ve £15 to spare buy “Partials Magic” from the addons site. Its a project that you can cut and paste partials, already built, that you can then alter to suit your own needs. I modified every partial in the set for my own use in about an hour and as there were so many don’t think I’ll have to do more again that the odd tweak. The process of modification itself is also great for learning how flexible this tool is.
) But in the video I try to set up a simple (and someone ugly) product partial with a button added in the way i just described.
i still have all those videos, i’ll just need to upload them to my server and repost them. maybe a YouTube channel is in order? that seems to be what all the cool kids are doing these days.