Designer
The visual page builder: pages, site parts, popups, forms and the template library.
Designer is a paid module. It edits layouts visually and stores them in the database, which is why an update never overwrites your work.
What it can edit#
| Document type | What it is |
|---|---|
| Home | The layout of the front page |
| Pages | Free-standing pages with a slug, SEO fields and group visibility |
| Site parts | Header, footer, announcement bar, 404, maintenance and no-permission screens |
| Surfaces | The inside of module screens: blog index, member directory, course catalogue, plans, search results |
| Areas | Widget stacks in regions such as a blog sidebar |
| Popups | Popups, off-canvas panels and floating bars, with triggers and conditions |
| Templates | Saved blocks and pages you reuse |
Forum screens are deliberately out of scope. The forum is the part of a community that benefits most from staying consistent.
The editor#
Three panels: the elements list, the canvas and the inspector. You drag an element onto the canvas, select it and adjust it on the right.
The inspector has three tabs:
- General: the settings of the element itself, its semantic tag, its link, its id and its display conditions.
- Style: classes, layout, spacing, size, position, typography, background, border and effects, plus custom CSS scoped to the element.
- Interactions: entrance, hover, scroll and sticky behaviour, all of which
respect
prefers-reduced-motion.
Every control can hold a different value per screen size and per state, with a visible marker for "inherited" versus "overridden" and a reset back to inherited.
Draft and published#
A document has a draft and a published version at the same time, and the site always reads the published one. Autosave keeps the last drafts, manual revisions can carry a summary, and publishing takes a snapshot.
History lists every revision with its author and time. You can preview one and restore it, and restoring creates a new revision rather than erasing the history.
Two people cannot edit the same document at once: the first one holds a lock with a heartbeat, and an administrator can take it over.
Popups#
A popup is a document with a trigger: after a delay, at a scroll depth, on exit intent, or on a click. Eligibility and "hide for signed in members" are decided on the server, so protected content never reaches the HTML of someone who should not see it. Frequency is remembered in the browser.
Forms#
The form element builds a form, validates it and can run actions after a valid submission. Submissions land in a queue in the panel, and an action that fails is reported without losing the message the visitor typed.
The library#
Designer > Templates holds your saved blocks and pages, and the official remote library is available while your update window for the module is open. Import and export use a plain JSON file, with an optional zip when media is included. Nothing in an import executes code.
Permissions#
Designer adds its own permissions to the group matrix: opening the editor, publishing, editing pages, editing site parts, editing surfaces per module, popups, templates, global tokens and classes, unfiltered HTML, and managing the module. The Element Manager goes further and turns individual elements on or off per group.