What are properties?

Properties or characteristics describe an object. For example, you can describe your rubber duck by ‘plastic’ and ‘yellow’. Strictly speaking, these are values of properties. The properties themselves are ‘material’ and ‘colour’. For example, you can describe your duck like this:

Bloembraaden implements this in three steps.

Property and Property value are full-fledged Elements within Bloembraaden. This means they have their own pages and template options, so you can fully optimize them for your visitors, customers and/or SEO.

Currently you can only attach properties to Variants and Pages. This has to do with the special triple link tables that now only exist for those two Elements.

Property

The Property itself must always be added manually. In the console at the bottom you will find a Property column and there you can manage the properties, just like the other elements. In the left EDIT screen of a Property you will see that you can also add/manage the values (Property_values) from here, but you can also do this directly on a Variant or Page.

Property value

Each Property_value (for example ‘yellow’) belongs to at least 1 Property, otherwise you cannot add it later. You’ve probably already seen in the EDIT screen that you can cross-link properties and their values. That is, you can add yellow to ‘Color’ to use with your rubber duck. But you can also add yellow to ‘Stitching’ if you sell a leather laptop case where people can choose the color themselves (e.g. cream, brown, black), but also the color of the thread with which you stitch it (e.g. blue, red, white, black, yellow).
It is important to realise that ‘yellow’ is simply yellow, the color, which can refer to different properties within your site.

You can of course also choose to create ‘yellow’ twice, but this is not recommended from a point of view of consistency and for SEO (Google does not know which yellow to trust being yellow and which one not).

X value (value of a value)

It is sometimes necessary to give a value another value. For example, if you look at the ‘cuddliness factor’, there are many possibilities. Maybe you go from 0 to 10. But maybe you have an old bear with one eye that actually deserves a 7.5. There you go, endless possibilities. This is the x value.
Turn your ‘cuddliness factor’ into a Property value, which falls under the ‘Soft skills’ Property, for example, and enter a 7.5 in the box for the old bear with one eye. You will get the box automatically, or if it is not there, click on the grey diamond to the right of the value of your element (i.e. next to the added ‘Soft skills: cuddliness factor’). You can only enter the x-value for the Element to which it applies, and the x-value does not get its own page or explanation.

Display of properties

For your visitor, the properties are displayed in the templates where they apply. This means that if you want something changed, you can adjust it in the template and it will immediately be adjusted everywhere on your site (after you have published the templates).
The exception is when you use multiple values of the same Property, for example Ingredient: cocoa: 80%, and then Ingredient: milk powder: 10%, then these are displayed in the order you entered in the EDIT screen for the relevant element is determined by dragging. They are still in the location indicated in the template, only the order of the (in this case two) ingredients in that location can be determined by dragging in the EDIT screen for your element.

Manage properties

You can manage Properties and their values just like any other cross-connectable Element, except that you can only get to the Properties from the console, and you can only manage the values from within each Property.

Important: Properties must be added manually from the Property screen. You cannot add an ‘Ingredient’ to a Variant before you have separately created the ‘Ingredient’ Property.

For the rest, it is very easy to manage from the Element to which your properties are attached (currently only Variant and Page).

In the EDIT screen you have a Property region with a search bar, just like Image and Embed etc. with the following differences:

Add value directly

When you type a value that you want to add in the search bar, you will immediately receive suggestions with a translucent area below where this value is listed in a list for all your Properties. Each line has a + button and when you click on it then Bloembraaden adds the value to your Element and also cross-links it to that Property. This cross-link is required otherwise Bloembraaden cannot display it everywhere. This way values that do not yet exist are easily added. Values that do exist (the suggestions) are provided with the characteristic oo ‘link’ icon. When you click on it, the existing value will be linked to your Element (Variant or Page).

Extra value (x-value)

If you want to give your value a value (e.g. 7.5 for your cuddliness factor, or 80% for cocoa), click on the grey diamond to the right of the linked Property and Property_value. A text box will open below the line and you can enter the value there. For Properties that already have such a value, the text box is always open, to remind you that you can (and depending on your template, also ‘must’) specify a value.

Order of values

You can change the order of values by dragging. Please note that your template most likely determines where exactly the Properties will be placed, and the order you drag only applies within one Property, so you only put the values in order.

Auto-save, auto-navigation

Just like the rest of Bloembraaden, everything is saved automatically. The appearance of an input changes when you edit it. You can see your changes are saved when the appearance is standard again. In a text input you can hit cmd+s / control+s to save intermediate changes.

For Properties, the texts are active links (that’s why they are underlined), so you can easily navigate to a Property or Property_value page. If you accidentally click, you can simply go back with your browser (alt + left arrow or the ‘back’ button of your browser) and the screen will be back where you left off.

Own page

Property_values that you add from an Element will have standard text or no text (depending on your template). If you notice that such a page is popular with visitors or if you find the page important and want to score better, you can always provide it with text and make it more attractive by following such a link and editing the page.