Literature: Tags Not Granular Enough

I was planning to start this blog with an article about setting up a Business Catalyst shop. But that’s a long article and in the mean time Business Catalyst continues to frustrate with the enduring problem of arbitrary and unnecessary limitations.

Today’s example is the “Literature” feature.

Literature is intended for downloadable documents such as PDF files, MP3 files and so on. It offers tracking of download statistics as well as the ability to protect a file inside a “private” membership area, etc. In this way it differs from vanilla file uploads to the Business Catalyst (virtual) file system.

So far so good. However I soon discovered that adding a link to a web page to download a literature item lacks flexibility. When you insert a literature item in a page, it adds a {module …} placeholder to the page which is dynamically replaced by some generated HTML. What is this generated HTML?

It is controlled by a “Literature Layout” which is a template snippet that includes a series of tags and some HTML markup. Problem is that the tags available are very limited. This is the same problem I’ve encountered in the shop and elsewhere in Business Catalyst — the provided tags offer the absolute minimum of functionality. There’s no reason for this. With a tag lookup mechanism already present in the “page renderer”, adding extra tags would not be difficult.

What is needed in this specific case of “Literature” are more granular tags. For example, I want to associate my own graphic button with the link to the literature item. But the only tag I’m offered that generates (and knows about) the actual link to the literature item is the “name” tag (tag_name). This generates the name of the literature item and the link. All together and inseparable. Not useful. I need also a tag that just generates the href so I can compose my own link tag with custom image content.

I’m moving pages from an existing static website into Business Catalyst and already have pages with links to MP3 files which are nicely formatted with graphic buttons and so on. I had to give up on using the Business Catalyst “Literature” function because it just doesn’t fit the way I want to present the links to these “literature” items.

Let us hope that the Adobe acquisition will result in an influx of new design and programming talent so that these myriad limitations are addressed.