Looking inside a project

[pkclsoft]

As a newby, I have imported my existing website into a project as a reference. My plan is to build a new website using Sitely with a lot of content from the existing site, but with Sitely functionality and styling.

I had thought I would be able to bring images from the import to the new project but am hitting an issue.

For example, I have, on my existing site an embedded slideshow of screenshots for an app. I wanted to mimic this within Sitely so I created an Image Gallery object, and saw that I can add multiple jpg/png’s to it and tell it to cycle through them. Great, but then I tried to copy the images from the old site project into this gallery but was unable to.

So I figured, being a Mac app, that the project would be a bundle or package (i.e. a directory of “stuff”) and I could just go into there and drag the images directly into the new projects Image Gallery.

But the Sitely project is not a package; it’s a file. Meaning I have no way to drill down into it. So now I am essentially copy-pasting text and image objects from one project to the other, and having to re-apply formatting/style/placement, one object at a time. It’s a lot more manual than I’d expected. There is a high chance that in my newby state, I’m just doing it wrong, but I figured that if I copy-pasted this selection from the old site:

I’d get them appear in roughly the same layout. Sure I didn’t expect it to be spot on, but this is not what I expected. Again, I am probably doing it wrong…

… drat I’m too new to insert two images. …

I had thought it would paste them below the last object in that “Layout Block”, but it seems to paste them over the top of existing objects.

It would be really nice to be able to copy images from one project to another, or export images from one project to a directory so that I can just drag them into the new project. Maybe I can.

Overall, whilst I sound like I’m whinging, I’m super impressed with the usability of Sitely and what it can quite apparently do; I just need to get over this initial hurdle of understanding how to use it I guess.

[pkclsoft]

OK. I now see that I was doing it wrong. Woke up this morning realising my mistakes.

Firstly, the file is an SQL Lite database so I can’t do what I was originally hoping by pulling assets out of the old page, but the flow of text and images around it can be done far more easily on Sitely than the import from my old website implied.

One text object and images placed correctly with flow settings and it just works!

There is always a learning curve.

[duncan]

Hi @pkclsoft, even if the project file was a bundle, it wouldn’t be advisable to poke inside it (it’s not a bundle due to hard to fix bugs that come up when that happens, also why Pages etc are no longer bundles). Yes Sitely now uses a sqlite store, but again not advisable to poke in it.

I must say I’m not understanding what issue you are seeing. You can drag a whole page from one project to another, or copy/paste multiple images. There currently isn’t an “export all image originals” and arguably it should be an option.

[pkclsoft]

it’s OK. I think what was happening was that I’d paste a group of text/image object into a layout object and it would tend to place it over the top of existing content instead of following it. but now that I better understand how to use the text/image object themselves I’ve got past that. What I had hoped earlier was to be able to select several images from project A and paste them into an image gallery. it doesn’t work because the things I’m copying are Sitely “image” objects that in turn reference actual images (sag/png etc) so I can’t paste those into the gallery because the gallery wants the raw images, not image objects. it was a matter of my not understanding.

but it would be nice to be able to drop an image object onto a gallery object and let the gallery object grab what it actually wants from the image object.

[duncan]

Oh I understand. What you can do in that case is to right click and convert the individual images into a gallery or a grid:

[pkclsoft]

and there we have what I should have realised what would be there all along…

Thanks. Faith restored.