Page Builders are all the rage today on the Web and allow for a great deal of flexibility and ease in creating great looking landing pages in a very short time. While they do a fantastic job when used for creating ‘Static’ Landing pages when you have to use them to create more dynamic pages you can hit a wall.
With our Products like JTicketing, Quick2Cart, Shika, JGive we get a lot of requests to help in customizing the UI of various layouts that we ship for the list views like Card & Blog layouts as well as for the detail pages. Joomla has a great way to allow you to customize the UI using Layouts as well as overrides. But more often than not Website builders are not aware or not comfortable having to touch code to build these custom layouts.
We thought if there would be a nice ‘Drag & Drop’ way to create such custom layouts, we can offer this freedom of creation to anyone. While that itself would involve creating a custom layout development tool, Page Builders actually do some of this already. So as an Experiment, we decided to create an integration between SP Page Builder & JTicketing to see what were the possibilities.
SP Page Builder
Built by the fantastic people over at Joomshaper, SP Page Builder not only provides drag and drop functionality but also provides a wide collection of page templates for designing web pages. SP Page Builder has plenty of addons and automated sections for its users for designing the web pages.
The JTicketing Integration Experiment
If you are familiar with page builders, you will know that constructing a page involves using ready to use content blocks. Now these can either be simple HTML design blocks or be dynamic elements that show for instance, Articles from a Category.
The JTicketing integration takes the approach of creating a set of such dynamic elements which will show different aspects of the event viz. The Event title, Image, Ticket types, the buy button, the description and so on.
Using a JTicketing integration plugin you'll be able to define per event if you want to use the standard JTicketing page that comes out of the box or want to use a Page designed in SP Page builder for this. And rather than this SP Page Builder Page being static, we will only use it as a layout & dynamically display the content for the event being browsed.
Stay tuned for the release & also for a blog on how to build such SP Page builder addons!