Master pages, please!

[Thack]

Having used some competing products with explicit master pages, I love them. It's great to have one place to work on all the common content on your pages - such as navbars, logos, copyright notices, etc - and have that content appear (and update) automatically on the other pages. In particular you can leave a lot of that stuff until after you've designed the other pages, which can be quite handy.

You don't have to link a page to a "master" if you don't want to; and the fearsome Serif WebPlus lets you make several master pages, for different sections of your site, should you want that.

You can get a similar functionality in Web Designer by creating a web page which you treat like a "template" for your other pages. You use "duplicate" to create a new page, and by creating objects with "Repeat on all pages" and "Update repeating objects" you can ripple changes across the whole site.

However, although it works, it feels like a bit of a kludge. Also, for a new user it is rather obscure and unintuitive (I had to seek help on this forum). Many of Xara's competitors offer a master page feature, and anyone coming from one of those (like me) would look for it, fail to find it, and uninstall Web Designer. Also, of course, anyone coming from a DTP background would do likewise.

I would like to ask Xara to add explicit master page functionality to Web Designer. It would really just be packaging the approach outlined above, so I guess most of the code is already there. Of course, I don't want it forced on anyone: it would be a feature that could be used or not, as the user prefers.

I hope you will consider it.

Thack

[steve.ledger]

Historically, new versions of Xara software are often released in the second quarter and include lots of new features many of which have been on users personal wish lists.

[pauland]

Gosh, sounds like a hint..

[Tallis]

The rain in spain falls gently on the plain...

[Thack]

Thanks, sledger. If Xara chooses not to implement it, that's fine. I just wanted to register the request.

Thack

[pbready]

Yes, I'm surprised they haven't implemented this since they have a wealth of experience (indeed may have been the first on the RISCOS platform) with master pages in their innovative DTP product Impression. For those of us who have experience of their early products such as Artworks (which arguably spawned Xara Xtreme) and Impression, it's clear bits of those technologies (or at least the concepts/algorithms) such as text handling and repelling etc have been slowly finding their way into Xtreme. Who knows, if Impression could have been made to generate HTML rather than its own DDCL (or something like that, it was a very long time ago), maybe it would still be ahead in terms of page layout and manipulation than WD now is ;-)