Experience Manager: How the configuration of regions affects the "insert" button behavior (in insert content panel)?

Question

In Experience manager interface we can find an insert button in the "Insert content" panel

The behavior we have today is the following one:

When one selects an item and clicks this button, the component presentation inserted into the page can be anything but a combination defined in regions.

To simplify the use case I have created the following unique region :

<!-- Start Region: {
  title: "Sample unique region",
  allowedComponentTypes: [    
                           {
                             schema: "tcm:4-123-8",
                             template: "tcm:4-1243-32"
                           }       
                         ],
  maxOccurs: 3
} -->

In such case, if we insert a component built from the tcm:4-123-8 schema, the system will chose any component templates but tcm:4-1243-32.

It means that is the tcm:4-123-8 is linked to this template only, the system will raise the following error message: "You can not insert this component. Selected component has not available component template."

For a new comer in XPM here is what could sound logical:

The first component presentation type defined in the page drives the default template to be used for the inserted component. If there are several regions, the first one in page could be used as the default drop zone. But then, of course, the question would be: Is the first region in the page the one we would really like to be the default one for the inserted component?

Questions:

• Is the first noted behavior the normal one? (or is there a problem in our implementation)
• Is the reason for this the one I suggested above?
• Then since this insert button can be really confusing for users in a purely "region oriented" implementation, is there any way to disable / hide it using the normal configuration ? (and not a CSS hack)

I checked the SDL Live documentation about this specific point without success.

Config: Tridion 2011 SP1 HR2

Answer 1

Your expectations are reasonable (that regions would somehow control the insert content options). But regions (set with JSON markup in rendered output on Staging) are distinct from Content Types, the "prototype" component presentations already on a given page or configured in publication properties.

For better control over the possible component presentations for new content, consider creating and using explicit Content Types, otherwise the default CPs will control how "insert" (new content) works, regardless of any regions on the page.

I try to clarify the difference in this post.

Edit: when adding existing components, you may need to drag-and-drop to correctly trigger the regions, otherwise the default behavior is to select templates in use on the page, matching what you're seeing (or select the oldest template for a given schema). A good approach is to start with a combination of page (proto) types and content types then add regions as needed.

Answer 2

You can try to change the tcm id's in the tcm id's from the publication you want to publish the page.