Settings

Introduction

Settings is a key/value parameter system, managed by the content editor in the backoffice — designed for website values that change frequently or vary by language (e.g., phone number, address, social media links, a logo image), without needing to touch code.

It involves three forms in the backoffice:

• Type (configuration_parameter_type)
• Parameter (configuration_parameter)
• Configuration (configuration)

Type

Defines what kind of value a Parameter accepts. It only has Code (code) and Name (name). These come pre-created by default:

Code	Name
boolean	Boolean
number	Number
image	Image
color	Color
text	Text
html	HTML

Parameter

Defines a configuration "key" — Code (code, used in the code to fetch the value), Description and the Type (which of the types above). E.g.: a phone-number parameter, of type Text.

Configuration

This is the value of a Parameter, for a given Language — Value (value, text) or Image (value_img), depending on the parameter's type.

Values without a language (generic fallback)

If a Configuration's Language field is left blank, that value is used as a fallback for all languages that don't have their own value set for that parameter. This avoids having to duplicate the same value (e.g., a phone number that's the same across all languages) separately for each language — it's set once, with no language attached, and a language-specific value is only set where it's actually different.

Programmatically

The website/src/common/Cluar.js class provides functions to read settings:

• Cluar.configuration(parameter) — gets a parameter's value in the current language; if there's no value for that language, it uses the value without a language (fallback); if neither exists, it returns the parameter's own name (useful to quickly notice a missing setting).
• Cluar.configurationNumber(parameter) — same, but converts the value to a number (0 if it's not numeric).
• Cluar.configurationMultilines(parameter) — same, but converts line breaks into <br>.

Next step

Explore Dictionaries.