Problem with drag n' drop custom modules after swapping design theme

[TJrising]

Hello,

I'm planning to redesign our landingpages.  I've cloned the existing design theme under a new name. To test things out, I made some changes in header and footer and in some drag n' drop custom modules. When I select the new design under the settings of an existing landingpage, only the changes in header and footer were adopted. The custom module code still comes from the old design theme folder.
What am I doing wrong? Or what's best practice for this without rebuilding all landingpages from scratch  with the new design theme?

[Anton · Accepted solution]

Hi @TJrising, 

if you're swapping just the template in the page settings, HubSpot won't change the modules besides the global ones. You have to change/swap the modules one by one.

The way HubSpot works is:

If you create a page from a drag&drop template and change something on the page - can be content or modules, HubSpot "detaches" the template from the page. This means that all future changes on template level will only affect new pages. 

If you change something on module level (doesn't matter if it's a global or non-global module) it will affect every instance of a module immediately after you hit "save/publish" in the module. 

As mentioned you'll need to swap every module you'd like to change on every page that uses the new template. Had to learn the template thing the hard way once - so definetely keep that in mind when working with theme migration.

Also a cleaner and easier way - and something I recommend is the content staging environment which let's you keep the URL but not the template/content (you can keep it if you want to). The great thing - you can - if you want create a page from scratch without worrying destroying pages/content that is live. Note: Content staging is not available for blogs

The process I recommend while working with content staging is this one:

1. move the page(s) you'd like to change to the staging environment
2. change the templates, modules, content - what ever you need to do
3. publish the page(s) in the staging environment (don't publish them to live environment!)
4. have at least one internal review round
5. move pages back to draft in the content staging if they need to be redone/optimized
6. optimize
7. repeat the steps 3-6 as often as you need
8. after final publishing push the pages to live environment (note: This will replace the current pages)

Hope that helps

best, 

Anton

[TJrising]

Hi Anton,

Thank you very much for your detailed answer. I will take a closer look at the content staging. The redesign of our blog with over 100 posts is also planned, so hard times are coming 😉

You say you can swap the modules one by one. Can you give me a tip on how to do this? I couldn't find an option "swap module" or anything like that anywhere. I would really like to avoid re-entering all the content.

Thanks and best,

Tim

[Jnix284]

Hi @TJrising happy to help clarify what @Anton  meant by swapping the module.

Unfortunately, it means that you would need to add the new module to the page from the new theme, rebuild the content and delete the old module.

Which is why he recommended content staging, you would essentially start from the blank template and repopulate the content.