I am converting / rewriting a website using Bootstrap Studio. The site currently has about 30 pages and is growing. As a result, my .bsdesign file is over 13 MB and growing. Exporting and uploading to the server as I complete each page is much more laborious than I would like as I must keep track of what has changed if I don't want to upload everything each time a couple of pages are changed.
This would help in my case but I might just prefer if were possible to right click on a page in the design pane and be able to select an "Export Page" option to only export that one page. I understand that such a feature could get complicated if any css or js that the page depends on has also changed.
Are there better ways or existing features that would allow me to export only portions of the site after selected page changes? (In addition, each export currently takes about 30 seconds to process.)
A related question might be how do others manage sites with a moderate number of pages? BSS seems to bog down a bit for me while editing my current site design. (Some pages are quite long articles and inserting a new paragraph can take several seconds.) Should I split out pages to a lesser number and spread the website over several BSS design files to be merged at server upload time? What is best practice here for handling more complex sites?
I've also been thinking about some of this again lately, and yes there have been a good handful of posts on this topic already, but what if we look at it a little differently.
What if instead of having it just time stamp the files only when changed and maintaining the last date changed/created dates, we instead have it give you a choice at exporting..
2 buttons ....
Export Full Project
Export only Changed Files
That to me would solve a lot of hassles right there, as long as it worked correctly and correctly time stamped everything and didn't miss any exporting etc.
It would still be good if it had the correct time stamps on all of the files when you exported the entire project as well, but having the option to only export files that have changed since last export would be great.
How would your ideal "Export Page" feature function? Will it export only the HTML, or the HTML and all assets? Or maybe the HTML and only the assets that are used in the page? Also would you like to be able to choose the folder it exports to, or to just drop the files to the location that was last used by the full export?
My own needs are rather modest. My approach is to build prototype template pages for each page a site might need and get all of the css and js working in the templates before starting on building the actual pages for the site. (There is sometimes a need to add css or js later but if I have planned well, it's rare.)
Because of that, all I would normally need for my own use is for the "Export Page" function to output HTML and any image assets used in that page. The css and other assets need not be exported for my typical usage. If I decide to change any css or js while writing a new page, I'm OK with exporting the whole site again since other pages may need to be tweaked anyway because of the changed css / js.
Ideally, a general purpose page export feature would probably export HTML and all changed assets that are used by that page, if possible. I would not need the export to go to a different folder as the time stamps on the freshly exported files would be enough to identify them as new for upload to the server.
I would concur with jd that the ability to export just the changed files would be perfect.
I have retyped this message about 8 times now HAHAHAHA. Each time I find a flaw in how this might mess us up lol. It would be great to have it export just changed files, but ... So many ways that this could be done! Which is the best way? It will be different for everyone really, because not everyone works the same way. Maybe a poll would be a good idea? I mean, I came up with all of these options so far:
Export Full site (as is now)
Export Specific Page only
Export Specific Page and all supporting files
Export Specific Page and all "changed" supporting files.
Export All "changed" pages and "changed" supporting files. (this would be my second choice)
Export Select Pages and Files (allow us to choose from all files exactly what we want to export) (this would be my first choice)
I'm sure there are some more common combinations that I'm not seeing as important, but I'm sure you get the idea. Many have asked for this type of feature to be added over the past year, maybe would be a good idea to poll everyone and see what they think?
I would like to raise this post again for reasons of deletion issues. Although no bugs have caused me to lose anything specifically, what I experienced was a deleted item, saved the project, closed BSS and then realized I still needed that deleted item. Unfortunately for me, I had to redo that particular item completely (was a script setup) because it was a new project, so I didn't have any backups to import it back in from yet.
This leads me to thinking that maybe I need to export my project each time I open the app and then again before I close the app and save those to 2 separate areas.... tedious I'm sure and would be a real hassle to try to keep track of all the renditions of a single project.
So, I come back to this possibility instead, of being able to export specific files chosen (the last choice on my list from my previous post) so that when I have a working copy of something that I know will be correct, I can create a directory for exporting specific components, files, pages, etc. so these losses won't happen. It's unfortunately the way of things when you work with a proprietary project file since all items are included in the file only (in this case being the BSS project files), so we don't have the ability to grab specific items without exporting the full site.
There's a lot of reasons for needing this export ability for specific files. Images are the same way, if you happen to delete the original from your computer (I don't most times, but I'm sure some do) because you think it's already in the project ... you do stand a chance of losing that item completely if you delete it from your project thinking you didn't need it or wouldn't use it and then later find out you should have kept it. Of course, you've already done all the image processing to resize, embellish, clean up etc of the image you had in BSS, so now you have to do it all over again after you get the image back from somewhere.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's a bit more important to be able to do this, than I had originally though myself when I posted last time. File loss truly is a possibility as I saw this morning with the new project. On projects I've exported already, this isn't usually an issue because I keep many renditions of my project files along the way in case I need to go back to something I lost or removed etc. But new projects... well that's not quite as easily done :/