Beginner questions: Purpose of Stacks, Migrating existing site, and importing content

Support
#1

I’m a DIY-er with existing web site built with Dynamik Website Builder, which I’ve used for nearly 10 years. I know a little CSS and HTML, but I’m not a web developer.

I purchased Pro today on the recommendation of a friend, and after being impressed by some of the YouTube videos. But my experience has been very frustrating. I have a hard time believing Themeco’s claim that 40% of its customers are first-time site builders; to me, the documentation seems aimed at people who’ve been using X or Pro a long time and already know the basics -and at professional developers.

I’ve done web searches, read the help documents, and watched videos, and I’m still lost. I decided to just jump in and try stuff, and ended up deleting content in a page which I couldn’t recover via Cornerstone’s Undo. (Thank heavens for WordPress’s version history.)

I activated Pro on a staging site of my existing web site, so there were a few dozen pages of content, almost all of which are static pages.

  1. What is the purpose of Stacks? I thought they’re a starting point for designing your site. As such, I expected that when I opened, say, the Header builder in Cornerstone, that it would show the header for Integrity (the Stack I chose). But it says “No Header Found - click to create a new header.” Likewise for the other Builders and the Templates window. Is there any way to pull in the design elements from the Stack into the Builders?

The documentation of Stacks simply describes the various controls, but those are fairly self-explanatory. IMO, it fails to explain what Stacks are for.

  1. My current site builder (Dynamik) controls the appearance, but you still add the content (posts, pages) in the standard WordPress editor.

Am I correct that with Pro and Cornerstone, you don’t use the WordPress post/page editor at all?

  1. Are there tutorials about how to open an existing site’s page and post content in Cornerstone?

While viewing the content of a pre-existing page in the Stack, I opened the Page builder and was asked if I wanted to start with existing content. But the page I was working on wasn’t listed. Why not?

I selected “Start from scratch” . I thought it would let me design the page elements while retaining the existing content of the page, but as I mentioned above it deleted all the content.

It’s looking like Pro just might not be a good fit for me.

But even with all my research, maybe I overlooked the answers to these questions.

I’d really appreciate any help.

Thanks!!

1 Like
#2

Hey Bob,

First of all, thank you for sharing your experience and feedback and we’re sorry to hear about your frustration. We’ll surely help you make the best out of Pro by walking you through the numerous features.

Before I answer your 1st question, let me share a bit of a history regarding the Stacks. Before Pro, there was only X and X does not have builders. It only has the Stacks which are like themes within a theme. Later on, partly because of customers demand to have more designs, Pro with its Header and Footer Builders were created to allow customers to build their own header and footer designs. Remember that Stacks are like themes within a theme. With your own design, you are now deviating from the pre-designed Stacks so Stacks are not connected to Cornerstone. Once you begin working with the builder, you’re like creating your own theme. To learn more about the Stacks, please see https://theme.co/docs/stacks.

For question #2, yes, we do not use the WordPress editor but you still can use it. What I mean is you are free to choose whether to use the WordPress editor or Cornerstone Page Builder. But, you cannot use both. The Page Builder will override your content made with the WordPress editor.

For #3, there’s none because the WordPress editor is separate from the Page Builder. You will need to rebuild your page in the Page Builder. Your question though doesn’t have context like what if you’re looking to page the surrounding elements within your content. In that case, you can use the Layout Builder to maintain the look of your content but have a completely different page design in terms of elements surrounding the content.

To your concern:

Cloning an existing content should only be done if you know the page was created in Cornerstone. If the page was not created in Cornerstone, it will override the page. With this in mind, it’s best that you create a page in Cornerstone to serve as a template. Then, you clone this page to easily recreate other pages. The Template Manager is also a useful tool for this case.

I understand your frustration with regards to cloning an existing page. Would it be helpful if pages that weren’t built in Cornerstone should not be included in the list of pages to clone? We’ll post this as a feature request.

I just want to touch on the 40% are first-time site builders. What I’d recommend is you systematically go through the Docs first starting from the Basics section. After you’ve gone through the basic Themeco account setup and start working with Pro, the very important thing for a beginner is to import a Design Cloud site. That way, you have a pre-built site to play and learn with. I stongly believe that you’ll get to know the features that way quickly unlike starting from stratch which is understandably overwhelming due to the numerous features available. By “from scratch”, that includes converting a site from a different page builder.

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Hope that helps and thank you for your questions.

#3

Thanks for the reply, @christian

I read it before posting. Multiple times. To quote my original post:

So…if I understand correctly:

Stacks are an alternative to building your own site from scratch or from a template in Cornerstone, but its customization options are limited. If the options for a chosen Stack meet the users’s needs, then they don’t need to use Cornerstone at all. They can add content via the Wordpress editor, and they’re done. Correct?

However, Stacks do not allow things like adding custom CSS. Correct?

Since the “Integrity” Stack seems like a good starting point, if I want more customization I should cause the Integrity Business site template in Design Cloud - correct?

The Stacks documentation should say something like this:

“Stacks are an alternative to Cornerstone and cannot be edited in Cornerstone. If you like the design of a Stack but want more customization options, go to the Design Cloud, where you’ll find at least two site templates based on each Stack.”

These two sentences would have saved me a lot of time and effort.

Yes. And the documentation should warn that if you’re viewing a page of a pre-existing site in Cornerstone (via a Stack) and start editing (by choosing something from the starting point chooser) that the content in that page will be overwritten.

I did that. And as I explain in this post, the Dashboard Options section is out-of-date. And not just the part I mentioned in that post. For example, “Edit with Pro” no longer exists.

When I didn’t see the Pro menu in the dashboard, I searched the forum and the web. Multiple times. I found similar posts, but nothing recent. Those posts said to do the standard troubleshooting, so I did (see the other post for details). I wasted an hour or two on this.

Later, I stumbled on another forum thread where a support person said - without being completely clear - that the Pro menu no longer exists. He linked to a Facebook post from nearly a year ago.

My point is that the outdated documentation has almost scared me off from using your product. I came across it only a few minutes after installing and validating Pro.

And before that: after validating, the top of the page says " Congratulations, you’ve successfully updated Pro!" and gives a link to “Release notes.” That link gives a 404 error. I hope you’ll understand that this is not a good first impression.

Got it!

Please explain. How would you convert an existing site?

Do I understand correctly that the only way to import existing posts and pages into Cornerstone is to copy the content from the Wordpress page editor and paste it into the Cornerstone editor?

1 Like
#4

Hey Bob,

Yes, that is correct.

Custom CSS is not dependent on Stacks. The Global CSS is a theme feature. You can learn more here https://theme.co/docs/code-editors

Yes.

It’s a manual conversion. Meaning you recreate your old pages to new pages by copy-pasting content.

Just a note on standard troubleshooting. It is an important practice for all customers because most of the time, our theme is not the cause of “technical” issues. If you experience technical issues like “builder won’t load, builder won’t output like the preview, menu not working, etc…”, definitely do the standard troubleshooting. Countless website issues have been solved because of performing the troubleshooting steps. The nature of your question or your case, however, is not a technical one but rather a fault in our (outdated) documentation which lead to your confusion. I’ll post that in our issue tracker so it will be queued to be updated. I’ll forward the rest of your feedback to the staff writing our documentation as well.

Thanks.

1 Like
#5

Hello Here Bobster,

I would like to add my own background because i have a lot in common with you.
I started on my own, and learned alone. I understand html/Css but no other code.
Thus, i am not a “web dev”.

I started with PRO (X back then) in 2014. It changed a lot (and it’s still changing every months).
I understand that it may be overwhelming at a first glance.

But that’s it. After trying multiple themes and doing the same search every year, PRO is the only theme providing an easy way for web enthousiasts to create powerfull websites in few hours of work without coding any single line of html or css. That part is really really great.

Now, you have a lot of ways to work your design.
If you are going with PRO, i would highly recommend you to look and try all the elements you have at your disposal, and learning them bit by bit. For exemple, you could try and create a page “from scratch”. Learning the basics of what you can do with sections, row, columns, are helpful.

If you need more help with that part, i would be glad to help you.

I keep building websites today. I do this for a leaving. I am very proud to say that this is thanks to themeco that i went this far.

I often teach to my customers “how to” handle elements with PRO. Most of the time they end up doing things on their own, and it goes smoothly.
If someone that has nothing to do with websites is able to understand it, i am pretty sure that you are going to be really good at that.

One final note. Themeco support has never failed me. They always answer very swiftly and they are always relevant.

Please don’t give up so easily and try it more, you will never regret it.

1 Like
#6

Hey @Thaelys,

Thanks for chiming in and sharing your great story with themeco. @bobster, hope you learn something from @Thaelys.

Cheers!

#7

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