Does free-form landing pages element honor grid frameworks?

[Sae_Vang]

Hello,

I am trying to find out if the free-form landing page types support content that will honor a grid system. I want to add a framework that uses grids in the template HTML markup, and then create a placeholder area for Marketo-editable content that Elements can go inside of. I am finding out from preliminary testing that the elements I add to the page can still be placed outside of this framework grid, thus not honoring my grid.

Is it possible for free-form or guided landing pages to have the ability to create modules like the email builder? Where I build out every possible module and then access the module by dragging-and-dropping the modules onto the page, and then edit the content?

Thank you in advance.

[SanfordWhiteman]

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I am trying to find out if the free-form landing page types support content that will honor a grid system. I want to add a framework that uses grids in the template HTML markup, and then create a placeholder area for Marketo-editable content that Elements can go inside of. I am finding out from preliminary testing that the elements I add to the page can still be placed outside of this framework grid, thus not honoring my grid.

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That simply won't work with the Free-Form LP Editor canvas. You could use (quite complex) CSS & JS to reposition elements within a grid, based on their closest dragged location, but that would only take effect at runtime, not in the editor.

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Is it possible for free-form or guided landing pages to have the ability to create modules like the email builder? Where I build out every possible module and then access the module by dragging-and-dropping the modules onto the page, and then edit the content?

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Unfortunately, no. The Email Editor module system doesn't have an equivalent in either of the LP Editors.

[Dave_Roberts]

It sounds like you'll want to use Guided Landing Pages to work with a grid -- I primarily work with Bootstrap (flexbox) inside a Guided LP template and I've not run into any issues like you mentioned with the Freeform pages. FWIW, the Freeform pages are the 1.0 version of pages (legacy) and for the most part are not mobile-friendly. I'd recommend using the Guided LPs as often as possible and recreating anything on the FreeForm LPs using a Guided LP.

To deal with the module scenario, there's not a way to drag-n-drop like you can for email, but there's nothing stopping you from creating a new LP with a bunch of modules on it that could be used to copy/paste modules into editable areas on your Landing Page. 

Let me know if you've got any questions about using the Guided LPs if that's new to you, I've really enjoyed the experience compared to the 1.0 FreeForm pages and I'd be happy to help you get something like that figured out.

[Sae_Vang]

@Dave_Roberts , thank you very much for your input! That was exactly my follow-up question: if it's possible to do drag-and-drop of modules within a Guided landing page. 

I have worked with Guided landing pages and so far they are working well. The challenge I'm running into is the level of effort involved in changing the template when a design element changes. Your idea of building out all possible modules (like you would an email) and then copy/paste them into the new guided landing page template whenever a new/different module is needed makes sense from a development standpoint. However, that still poses a challenge if a developer is not involved in the process of building that new template.

Do you have any examples of guided landing pages with all modules built out, and how would you go about plug-and-playing those modules into a new guided landing page template? Would this still be possible if the design of the modules change from template to template? Or could it mean you develop out each possible module and allow it to be editable with every possible way possible (via Elements and Variables)?

Thanks in advance!

[Dave_Roberts]

Here's a look at what a Module Library page might look like. You'd want to build something like this as a stand-alone Guided LP template in Marketo where the dotted boxes were editable text areas on the page. Then you can build a new LP using that template and populate the dotted boxes with content (modules) that could be copy/pasted into your other Landing page layout. This works especially well with a grid-structure like Bootstrap's flexbox (4.x) or grid (5.0) css because the modules here can just snap into the shape of the container on your other LP.

[FLEX] LP Module Library

To provide a build-as-you-go approach, you can build out all the basic HTML element the way you would in Email. In the same way you can stack a "Heading 1" module on top of a "paragraph" module in Email, you could copy/paste a Heading 1 module from the library into the layout you're working on and then copy/paste a paragraph right below it. This can work around the need for a developer so long as you're not doing things that are too complicated with your modules. 

If there were things you wanted to change, the easier way might be to make a bunch of variations of each module so that the end-user could copy/paste from the Module Library into their layout. This sets the bar really low in terms of needing a developer to help b/c you can just grab the variation of the module you'd like to use and paste that into your layout in place of whatever is there (click into the HTML, delete what's there and paste the module code you got from the library). It's not exactly drag-n-drop, but I think copy/paste is the 2nd best thing here.

To work around the need to constantly make variations to your layouts (and reduce the overall dev dependency), you'll want to create a series of "Layout LPs" that are preconfigured to a specific layout or use-case and then clone those layouts to create a new asset rather than creating a new LP based on the template (which wouldn't be preconfigured). To make it even easier on the end user, you can set those assets (LPs) up in Program Template folders and tokenize them to help automate the workflow and kind of take the end-user out of the LP editor all together unless they were in there to make an adjustment to the layout (rather than the content).