Supportive Content Blocks

Adding an article to your site will provide your visitors with useful information, but to provide the most value for your page, it is often helpful to provide supporting information to an article. We always provide a page layout template that includes a thin right column next to the wide main column specifically to allow for supporting information, and we provide a range of content blocks to make adding supporting information quick and easy.

Link Blocks

A link block, as the name implies, adds a link to the column. Links are usually added individually when a significant amount of information needs to be collected about the link. A link block will typically have a title, description, link text and link url, possibly also with a display style and target (which determines whether the link is opened in a new window or not). The SAHA website makes effective use of link blocks.

Link Lists

Link lists, on the other hand, provide a simple mechanism for adding lists of links to the page. They quite simply collect text, a URL and possibly a target for each item in the list, usually with a heading for the whole block as well. The list can be used to provide links to other pages in the site with similar content, to other sites with useful content or to PDF or MS Word document downloads. The Master Builders website makes good use of link lists.

Image Links

These rather simple blocks are similar to link blocks, except that instead of collecting a heading, text, link text, etc, the block simply collects an image, the link URL and the target. This block is best used with specially designed graphics. The Master Builders website uses image links to highlight key items on their home page.

News Feeds

The news manager (which we’ll discuss in a future post) allows each news article to be categorised with multiple categories. If you plan ahead, and categorise your news articles cleverly, you should be able to build up a regular news source for specific parts of your site. The news feed content block allows you to add a short feed from the news manager filtered by a category. This filter allows you to pull only the most relevant news onto a particular page, and to add different news to other pages. Any module that is based on the News Module can provide categorised feeds. Trellidor uses a news feed on their corporate responsibility page, keeping clients up to date with their many projects.

RSS Feeds

This content block allows the administrator to provide feeds from external sources into a page. This is sometimes used in support of a particular page, but is more often used on the home page. It can be used to include information from any RSS resource, but is almost exclusively used to include feeds from the clients’ own blog or forums. The content block itself cannot provide a category filter, but the feed itself can usually be configured to provide entries from a subset of the blog if required. Master Builders uses a forum feed to support their Health and Safety page.