I’ve seen numerous people in this forum complaining about the implementation of Presets and Global Blocks. The consensus seems to be that these two features should be merged. I concur with this and feel strongly that the current implementation is both awkward and inconvenient.
When you insert a Preset, it’s completely independent of its master template, so if the template later changes, none of the instances will be updated.This makes Presets virtually useless, as any time you want to change the design of a Preset, you’d have to manually update all its instances on the site.
Global Blocks are better, in the sense that instances are linked to the master template. However, with a Global Block, the content is also linked, which again, severely limits their usefulness. Suppose I want to create a Features (Icon / Headline / Text / Button) grid, with each block in the grid styled exactly the same. I should be able to create the first block in the grid, apply the desired styles and then save it as a Preset Template. I should then be able to insert that template into the remaining blocks in the grid, editing the headline, text and icon for each of the blocks. Later, if I decide to make some style changes, like increasing the size of the headline, that should automatically update the headline in all the blocks.
We should be able to click on any element or group of elements and save that as a preset template. An instance of the template could then be inserted anywhere else on the site and would automatically be linked to the template, so if the template is later updated, all its instances would automatically be updated. However, an instance could also be detached from the template. Once detached, it would no longer be updated when the template is updated. We should be able to independently detach the content and the design, so you could create an instance which is linked to the master template design, but could have its own content. In this case, if the master template design was changed, that would update the design of the instance, but leave the content alone. This could also be reflected in the UI. In the feature block example I mentioned, when you insert a new instance of the feature block with design linked and content detached, it would only display options to change the icon graphic, the headline text and the body text. All the other options, like font size, color, etc… would be hidden, since those options would be non-editable. There could also be a button bar at the top, where the user could switch between the different modes: Link All / Unlink Content / Unlink All.
It really makes no sense to have two separate features that accomplish nearly the same thing, yet with each one lacking in a way that makes it virtually useless.Currently, we have the worst of both worlds. Instead, these features should be merged into a single admin screen and we should be able to specify whether each instance of a template is linked to its master template or detached and individually editable.