Introduction

To understand how Clay Space Edit works, first we need to make sure we're on the same page with what this plugin solves.

The Problem

Say you have a component on a page that you only want to display when certain conditions are met, such as only wanting to display a component for "Related Posts" if there are other posts within the same category as the current post you're on. If there aren't any other posts in the same category you want to display links to social media sites. Rather than rendering both components (the "Related Posts" and "Social Links") to the DOM and hiding/displaying them with a client-side script, what if you could somehow run a test against the content of your site and conditionally control which component is rendered on the server?

The Solution

While Clay Space Edit provides a method for accomplishing this, its real job is to make the editing experience of these conditional components easy. This plugin doesn't tell you HOW to test or WHAT to test, it just sets up the experience around editing your conditions.

Now, let's talk about some Terminology or skip to the component Lifecycle.