Getting ready

In the previous recipe, we placed different components on different placeholders, for example, the Title and Body rendering on the main-content placeholder. We will place Carousel or any other rendering on the same placeholder from the Experience Editor.

How to do it…

As we want to place components on the main-content placeholder of the Home page from the Experience Editor, we will first create a placeholder setting for it:

How it works…

There are two types of placeholder settings: global placeholder settings and data template specific placeholder settings.

In the preceding steps, we used the global placeholder setting as we specified a placeholder key in the placeholder setting. So, whenever Sitecore finds the main-content placeholder in any component of the requested page, it will allow us to manage components on that placeholder. In our case, it will be shown on all the pages of the website. So ideally, it's good practice to use the global placeholder setting for placeholders of the main layout of the site.

We can also set placeholder settings on the data template level. For example, we want to restrict the main-content placeholder setting only for Site Root or other selected templates. For this, we should follow these steps:

Now you will be wondering how Sitecore adds the components directly to Layout Details of the page. Open the Layout Details of Home item; you will find that the Carousel rendering we added from the Experience Editor got stored to FINAL LAYOUT, where SHARED LAYOUT is still the same as before, as shown in the following image. This is because of the Versioned Layouts feature we got from Sitecore 8. Read more about it at https://goo.gl/FXxHkP:

You can also remove any components by clicking on the Remove component. button found on the floating toolbar of the component, as shown in the following image:

Learn more about the Experience Editor at https://goo.gl/1ZFIpX.