containers? nested components?

I have a design that contains has three columns in the body. The center column is supposed to be able to hold multiple different components as selected by the content editors. The entire column is also supposed to be styled with a header bar, background color and border. As far as I can tell, this isn't really possible with LiveSite. Am I missing something? Is there a way to create stylized containers or nest components in LiveSite?

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tec_iwov

There is no ability to switch out components on a page, what you would have to do is have a base template where you would have different pages that would display the different content well components. The only current alternative is to have a component that will handle mutiple component content, but this would make for a very complex component xsl.

JasonH

I think you misunderstood my question. Or, maybe I'm misunderstanding yours. I do not need to "switch out components on the page". The center column will hold one or more components depending on the page. The entire column needs to be styled with a background color and border so that it looks like the components in the column are grouped together. Is that possible?

wscott

LiveSite doesn’t support layouts this complex very well. You MIGHT be able to do it using a custom page Layout Type xsl, although it would be a fairly complicated xsl to divide the components into groups. If only the center column contains components -- the other two columns are fixed -- it is considerably easier (just make the stuff in those columns into part of the Layout Type xsl).

In the past, customers have been able to fake it by placing spacer components between and around their normal components – instead of a grey box with components in front of it, you have a bunch of narrow grey spacers surrounding the components. This quickly becomes tedious if the layout has many components, though. You could also try using components with thick grey borders, placing them adjacent, and using components to fill in the rest. Or you could try the reverse: make the header, footer and side columns use white spacers, an make the page background grey, so that the components in the center column are easier to customize (this is easiest if your header and side columns are part of a template).

You might be able to do something creative with DHTML. Perhaps the column in the middle is just an iframe component that points to a whole separate LiveSite page, or perhapse the middle column is loaded in the background and then inserted as content into the body of a DIV tag.

Shazzer

Jason,
There are lots of ways to achieve the desired effects using custom layouts and css.

A similar question was asked not too long ago - try this thread:
http://devnet.interwoven.com/forums_vb/showthread.php?t=17564&forumid=66&highlight=custom

Depending on what you need to achieve, we have had success applying custom stylesheets and using scripts which create containers around the rest of the components (an example of this is included in the link above), as well as pulling in SSIs through the custom layouts for page components that we do not necessarily want the users to have to deal with (ie - page headers and footers etc).