XPM: Moving component presentations in a page

Question

I am trying to move component presentations across a page using XPM, but I don’t completely understand the rules followed by XPM to move component presentations. Does it calculate the new place using the other Component Presentation marks in the page? Our problem here is that we use nested component presentations to render component links, we have obtained weird results when moving component presentations (not nested but the outer component presentation). For example, we have three component presentations in our page, but one of them is a component that has three linked components. We render each linked component using RenderComponentPresentation function, and the inner component template does the marking work for each nested component presentation. So we have:

<span>
 <!-- Start Component Presentation …… (First component) -->
</span>
<span>
  <!-- Start Component Presentation …… (Collection type component) -->
    <span>
     <!-- Start Component Presentation …… (Linked component)-->
    </span>
    <span>
     <!-- Start Component Presentation …… (Linked component)-->
    </span>
</span>
<span>
 <!-- Start Component Presentation …… (Other component) -->
</span>

When I try to move the last component presentation using the arrows in the ribbon, it doesn’t move. I think it has something to do with the nested component presentation but as I don’t understand the rules XPM follows, I am not sure how to solve the issue.

Answer 1

I think you first should click on the icon in ribbon toolbar for Content Border to reflect borders of all your component presentation. Ensure that you have border of your content getting created in webpage as per the expectation and your first component presentation area is not getting partially overlapped with the component presentation of second component (which you are trying to move).

Answer 2

You should keep in mind what Tridion is trying to do when you move Component Presentations. Experience manager will change the order of the Component Presentations in the page when you move them. So, embedded CPs will definitely not work.

You should still be able to move the CPs (first, list, other), but not the ones within the list, since those are not in the page.

This also means that your Page Template, when publishing the page, should respect the order of the CPs in it, or the editor won't see any changes after publishing.