I have no idea what's going on, just logged in today and seems like everything changed. Are we forced to use slices now for repeatable groups?
Hi James,
Groups are still available in both the legacy builder and in Slice Machine. You can have groups in the top-level Static zone of your Custom Types as always, although they have never been repeatable (This is being tracked as a feature request here).
You might be thinking of the repeatable zone of Slices, which are essentially repeatable groups.
Let me know if you have any further questions.
Thanks.
So to be clear, the only way to achieve a repeatable group of fields is to create slices (not counting legacy options). Is this correct?
Just trying to understand, so going forward, if we want to create repeatable groups of fields, we need to create a slice for said repeatable group, code and tailor the slice, publish the slice, etc...? is this correct?
Correct that has always been the behaviour, also counting legacy behaviour.
There has been no change in the behaviour of Groups, Groups are intended for single instance grouped content in the Static Zone, like a page banner.
Slices have always been the only way to create repeatable content. This is the advantage of Slices, as you only have to model and code the Slice once. You can use a Slice as many times as you need to create your content, as well as mixing and rearranging the Slices easily to create unique website pages from only a small amount of work.
Slice Machine makes it even easier to do this by creating your models for you, giving you suggested code snippets and allowing you to use mock data to simulate how a Slice with content will look. All this speeds up your development process, as well as allowing you to version your modelling alongside your code.
1 Like
I'm not following. This was the traditional way of creating repeatable groups was it not?
Were these considered slices?
In the use case of adding a simple list of text inputs, I don't at all see how creating the slice in the slicemachine, editing the code snippets, deleting multiple directories and files in various locations to remove them...is easier.
So in this use case, we would be expected to create slices for for every repeatable group no matter the size or complexity of said group?
Groups
That's still the behaviour, nothing has changed there, whether in Slice Machine or Legacy. You can still repeat elements inside the group.
You just can't have multiple instances of the group, so:
[Group]
[Fields]
[Fields]
[Fields]
[Group]
But not:
[Group]
[Fields]
[Fields]
[Fields]
[Group]
[Group]
[Fields]
[Fields]
[Fields]
[Group]
Slices
It's true, deleting a Slice completely from the codebase is still a manual process and this is being tracked as a feature request to be improved. You can however remove a Slice from a Custom Type in the UI and it will no longer appear in the documents.
The advantage of a Slice over a Group is that say for example you have an image gallery in the Static Zone of a Custom Type:
- Your content creators cannot rearrange the position of this Group in regards to other content, they are restricted by the shape of the Custom Type. Even it's just text input, the fact it is free to change position in regards to the other types of content allows page building flexibility that's not possible in the Static Zone.
- If you want to add another image gallery to the Custom Type you have to model another Group and update the code. With a Slice this is done by the content creator without the input of the dev.
- Same goes for adding that Slice in a different Custom Type.
- The same also goes for deleting the Slice from the live website, a group cannot be deleted by the content creator.
This is true, however then you have the repeatable groups out of the natural flow that you have on a page which can be very confusing to beginner editors. Add to that the problem with no being able to delete slices properly, AND the fact that there seem to be stock slices and categories we have no control over, the editor is gonna be spammed with a bunch of irrelevant choices that confuse them more.
If you want to add another image gallery to the Custom Type you have to model another Group and update the code. With a Slice this is done by the content creator without the input of the dev.
I think this point has serious merit and is one of the main advantages of Slices.
It seems like an ideal situation would be the best of both worlds, Slices for situations where you need to repeat across custom types, a repeatable groups where you don't have to worry about scaffolding out a Slice for every small thing you repeat.
I could be wrong and it would be interesting to hear other developers input here, but the change seems to tell us what to do, rather than to empower us to do what we were gonna do and allow us to do it easier.