Identify and Categorize Your Blocks

Modified on Thu, 21 May, 2015 at 9:47 AM

What is the Block Definer?

The Block definer is a selector of a category for each block in your websites’ layout. This is mainly for organization purposes, so it’s easier to identify when you are making certain edits. Our site creator currently has these kinds of blocks available:

Header
Intro
Body
Footer

The following diagram illustrates how a site layout looks by default. Note that you can create more blocks, delete the ones you don’t need, or reorder them with the layout builder.

This diagram shows how your layout is organized in blocks

How to Change Block Type

You’ll notice on the left side of your layout, right outside your actual page, some space where the names of each type of block appear.

It is there where you can update the type of block.

You can update its kind by clicking on the block selector on the left of your blocks

But you won’t be able to change all of them. Some restrictions apply.

Not All Block Types Can Be Changed

There must always be a “header” block. If you rearrange and remove all blocks around, the last one will gain this label (header), if it doesn’t have it already. And since it's the last, you won’t be able to remove it.

You can’t change its type either, notice how it doesn’t have the small triangle on the right that indicates a dropdown menu to change it. This one will be always your first/top block.

You can’t change the type of block for the first one on the top

Right below the header, comes an “intro”. You can only select a block to be an intro immediately after the header, and nowhere else. But you can also make it a “body”.

Below the header, you can have either an “intro”, or a “body”

The last block on the bottom of your layout can be a “footer”. You can turn it into a body, but you can’t have a footer elsewhere. It must always be the last one down below.

As for bodies, you can have as many as you need. Every other block (that is not either a header, intro or footer) will be a body. And they will be numbered according to how they appear in your page, the first one below the header is number one, the next is two, and so on.

How It Helps You Stay Organized

As stated before, the block definer is helpful for organizing better your layout and identifying places that you want to edit. One of these cases is on the Bulk Style Editor.

There, you can get a list of blocks to which your changes will be applied to.

In the bulk style editor, you can select one, several, or all blocks to get your style changes applied to

Another place where it's helpful is when creating pages. There you’ll get a list of apps you want to copy from current page to the new one. And these apps are grouped into blocks.

In the page creation process you get a list of apps you want to copy to your new page

But there’s more. As the platform shifts and evolves, you will be able to push the styles for a given block (or all of them) across your pages. Without this classifications, we wouldn’t be able to identify which styles to propagate (share/copy) in which block in other pages.

For more information, see the following post:

Customize Layout Design

For any questions or comments, please get in touch.