How do I reuse existing content?
More than often you find yourself in a situation where you want to reuse content already written once at a given location on your website.
TYPO3 lets you reuse both entire pages as well as individual content elements. The latter being one of the reasons it is advocated to use several content elements on pages instead of just using a single content element.
As usual with TYPO3, there are several ways of achieving the same results - the following is only a demonstration of a few selected ways.
Reusing an entire pages content on another page
If you do not already have the page in which you wish to insert content from another page, create a new page.
Edit the new pages properties, and switch to the "Options" tab. Scroll to the bottom, and find "Show content from this page instead".
Note
If you do not see this option, your administrator may need to enable it for you.
Click the small folder icon to open the "element browser". The "element browser" is all pages on your website represented in a page tree structure. Locate the page which content you wish to use, and click it.
Save your work. That's it!
A few things to note about this feature
- If you view your page in the TYPO3 backend, it will appear empty although it is not.
- Editing a page made with this feature, is done in the original page.
- You can also add new elements to it, but these will not show up in the frontend.
- You may also need to make sure that both pages use the same template layout. Editing which template layout a page uses, is done in the "Extended tab".
Reusing a content element from another page
Any content element regardless of content element type (text, image, plain HTML, plugin, etc.) can be inserted once, and reused multiple times on other pages. Here is how.
Locate the element you wish to reuse, and click the "Create reference" icon on the element.
You have now picked up the element in a virtual clipboard, and a clipboard icon with a green arrow is shown in all the possible places you can insert the element.
Switch to the page you wish to insert the item, and click the green arrow in the position you want the element.
And that is basically it.
If you edit the element, your edits will work on all elements with reference to the original element, as well as the original element itself.
A referenced item can be recognized by having the label of the element written in italics (Contact us in the screenshot below) - and that it does not have the "Create reference" option, but instead has a new "Create local copy" option. Use this if you wish to detach this particular referenced element from the original element.
If you wish to see the location of the original element, and which other pages might use this element, click the upper left icon of the element, to open the context menu - and click "Info".
Scroll to the bottom of the Info-viewer of the element to see "references to this item"
