Boilerplate overwrite protection for child sites

I plan on managing a bunch of different blog sites for real estate agents where I add the blog posts with the boilerplate extension and then I’ll be heavily encouraging the agents to go in and edit their posts to really make them their own.

My concern is that if I want to go in later and say update an image through the boilerplate extension or maybe change a few words around, it looks as though those changes would completely overwrite the changes that were made by the agents on their child sites.

I was hoping that there might be an option where a warning came up about overwriting certain sites where changes have been made but it doesn’t look like there’s anything like that in place. Has anyone experienced this scenario and if so, is there a way around it?

Right now, there’s no out-of-the-box solution for that in Boilerplate.

As always, you are most welcome to make a suggestion on our feedback site.

In the meantime, perhaps someone from the community can figure out a workaround.

@russhunter I’ve come across the exact same problem.

You’re correct, Boilerplate will overwrite any changes that have been made by the end-user.

The workaround is a bit messy, but it’s possible. On the client’s site, you need custom functions to:

  • detect whether incoming posts are from the Dashboard. If so, add a hidden field which marks the post as being a boilerplate.
  • detect whether the end-user has modified the local version. If so, set another hidden field which can be used to skip subsequent updates from the Dashboard for that particular post.
  • provide documentation and training for the end-user so they understand the implications.

Another thing to note, Boilerplate doesn’t work with common page builders. This means there’s a tradeoff between the convenience of automation for you, versus the ease of updating content by the end-user.

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