When developing websites using the Squarespace Developer Platform, one of the fundamental building blocks of each page is the site layout. The render chain of all pages starts with a layout, and they wrap the individual page contents. Generally the layout is reponsible for things like the <html> and <body> tags, global navs, etc.
Every page on the site has a selected layout (Page Settings > Advanced > Page Layout), and a site can contain any number of layouts.
If you choose to remove a layout (i.e., delete it from layouts in template.conf), but there are still pages using that layout, you may wonder what will happen. I haven’t found any documentation describing the intended behavior, but as best I can tell:
- The pages will continue to exist.
- They will be rendered using one of the remaining layouts, but it’s not clear how that gets decided (it may be the first layout defined in
template.conf). - If you restore the layout to
template.conf, the pages will begin using that layout again (i.e., the association seems to be keyed on the layoutname). - The
Page Layoutsetting for the pages, at least in the UI, will be null, but can be switched to any remaining layout.