PageLines Framework vs. PlatformPro

Revision as of 16:06, 26 January 2012

Since the launch of the new PageLines Framework, we’ve had tons of questions about “what’s different.” Here are some highlights on some of the new features and information on how they compare to PlatformPro.

A Better Experience for Your Users (Responsive/Mobile Design)

PlatformPro is based on a static website framework. Meaning the front end design won’t adapt to your users browser or device. While 99% of the web is still ‘static’, with v2 there is now a better solution!

PageLines is now the first major framework to be based on a responsive grid and this is one of the most far reaching changes in version 2.0.

Having this grid means you can now allow your website to ‘respond’ to user’s browser; even if they’re viewing your site on a mobile phone or tablet. this makes for a much richer, more professional viewing experience and your visitors are gonna love you for it.

More Placement Options

PlatformPro didn’t have the ability for many sections to be added to the content area. For example, the feature slider could only be added at the full width of your site.

This isn’t a problem anymore.

Because the framework is now ‘responsive’ it’s also possible to place sections like the Feature Slider, or the Carousel, in the content area of your website. These sections themselves are also responsive and adjust based on different browser resolutions.

Control New Page Types

In PlatformPro it wasn’t possible to edit pages that didn’t handle “meta data” or page-by-page options. This presented a challenge and some pages (for example “tag” or “search” pages) couldn’t be controlled very well. Essentially they all had to have the same setup as the blog page.

To solve this, we built a new system called ‘special page handling’ to deal with this. A new panel in the framework is designed just to create handling for all types of pages that weren’t not possible to control in PlatformPro. These include tag listings, categories, archives, search results, etc..

Better Page-by-Page Control

In PlatformPro, there were two major design issues that have been vastly improved…

Meta Options > Global Options
In PlatformPro, most options were created on a global scale which prevented you from controlling certain features on different pages. In effect, you needed to have the same settings “site-wide”.

To fix this, we vastly enhanced the meta option api (e.g. the page by page option handling) to handle things on a more granular basis. Now in the framework you’ll easily find dozens of options you can set either globally, or via the meta settings. This allows you way more control of how your individual pages look.

Way More Section Flexibility PlatformPro was only designed to handle one instance of a section per page; and this caused some frustration among users. For example, if you wanted to use a ‘callout’ section on the top and bottom of a page, you couldn’t do it. This got very frustrating for people who were having to create custom sections just to solve the problem. For this reason, we built something called cloning which allows you to simply duplicate most sections right on your page.

Another feature that was improved is Section Control, a feature that allows you to selectively hide and show sections that you’ve placed on a template. That system is now way more robust and intuitive.