Cells

Deprecation note

With Alchemy 4.2 cells have now been superseded by fixed elements.

Cells are fixed areas on a page and act as element containers.

Often you have fixed sections on a page like a sidebar or the popular hero. These are perfect candidates for cells.

If you want to be able to change the position of element containers, you probably want to use nestable elements instead.

Defining cells

Cells are defined here:

config/alchemy/cells.yml

You also have to define the cells to use in your config/alchemy/page_layouts.yml

INFO

You can only add elements that are both defined in your cells.yml and page_layouts.yml!

yaml

# cells.yml
- name: left_column
  elements: [image, text]

yaml

# page_layouts.yml
- name: standard
  cells: [left_column]
  elements: [image, text]

Normally cells are rendered on page_layouts. They can be called with this helper method:

erb

<%= render_cell(:cellname) %>

If you render cells like this, an additional view-partial is rendered, naming scheme is /app/views/alchemy/cells/_left_column.html.erb

In this partial use <%= render_elements from_cell: 'left_column' %> to render cell-related elements only.