Ran into another case of variants not playing well with other software. First, it was ecwid ecommerce embedded in Xara. It works fine for one variant but will not work on multiple variants.
The latest problem is with a couple of PHP scripts I purchased from PHPjabbers; Simple CMS and Blog.
The Simple CMS offers an option of using php or javascript. No go on the PHP, but the js works great. Two days into testing this and it is everything I wanted from a simple tool to allow clients to do simple updates to a site; change headlines, change text articles, change images, upload files with links... Less than an hour to install, learn to use and integrate into a Xara website. And the price is ridiculous.
I thought I had figured a workaround for the Blog but the variants came around to bite me in the butt again. The blog requires a line of code as the first line on the page, another line of code as the last line on the page and a line of code in the body. The Xara placeholder works fine for the code in the body. But Xara doesn't allow you to specify placing code in the first and last line of a page. So clever me - I published the site with a .php extension on the "blog" page and simply edited the code for the page on my server. IT WORKS! pretty excited! But here are my two challenges:
- First - can I tell Xara not to publish a page? I don't want to have to manually edit the blog page code each time I make an update to the rest of the site.
- Second - my excitement was based on testing on the desktop. But when I go to the mobile version the blog does not display.
Resolving the first issue only matters it I can resolve the second.
Are any of you guys geeky enough to read the page source and figure out how to make it work in both variants? Of is this a design issue with how Xara handles variants and can't we worked around?
THANKS!
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